What does it mean for the architect to fall?

Richard Francis-Jones explores the irrational impulse to stand at the edge of a great height and feel compelled to step off, to fall. The strange phenomenon known as the "call of the void."

But could this impulse also be a metaphor for the architect's condition? We are compelled to reach upwards, to rise above the ground and, in some sense, defy gravity itself.

In this episode, I ask whether the survival of architecture might depend on our willingness to take that step: to fall, to return to the ground, to reconnect with the earth from which we come.

Credits
Author and Host:                                        Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                 Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:      Erica Volk

What does it mean for architecture to be sustainable? And what, exactly, are we trying to sustain?

In this episode, Richard Francis-Jones explores the relationship between architecture and nature, and how modernity has increasingly separated us from the natural world. As architecture becomes more technical, measurable and engineered, what happens to its essential relationship with nature? And if architecture loses this connection, what is to become of the architect?

Credits

Author and Host:                                         Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                  Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:      Erica Volk

Architecture has always had a face. A surface that connects and communicates a building to its surroundings.

But somewhere along the way, that face became a mask.

Richard Francis-Jones explores how that happened, and what it might mean to recover architecture's face again.

Credits

Author and Host:                                          Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                      Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:           Erica Volk

Architecture is slow. It has always been slow.

We live in a culture organized around the ecstasy of speed, overwhelmed by information, stimulation, and the forgetting that follows.

Richard Francis-Jones explores what it means to design in a world that has lost the capacity to wait.

Credits

Author and Host:                                         Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                     Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:          Erica Volk

Architecture can make weight look weightless, walls look open, solid look transparent. 

Every one of those is a lie. 

Richard Francis-Jones argues that architecture's greatest truths are revealed through its lies.  As Picasso put it, "Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth."

Credits

Author and Host:                                         Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                     Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:          Erica Volk

Architecture isn't solved, it's felt. Not through theory, through intuition. A feeling that comes less from us than through us. 

Theory offers a brief platform to catch your breath above the tide of practice, but it never holds for long. 

Richard Francis-Jones traces what supplants it once that platform gives way.

Credits

Author and Host:                                         Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                     Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:          Erica Volk

The feeling every architect has, but none talk about.

What if the honest response to crisis isn't hope, but melancholy? Not despair, but a form of creative clarity.

Richard Francis-Jones opens the series by naming the feeling most architects carry but rarely admit to.

Credits

Author and Host:                                         Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                     Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:          Erica Volk

Richard Francis-Jones opens the series with an Acknowledgment of Country.

Credits

Author and Host:                                          Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                   Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:        Erica Volk

Through a series of deeply reflective essays, Richard Francis-Jones explores the profound questions confronting architecture, asking what it has forgotten, what it has become, and what it might yet be.

Credits

Author and Host:                                        Richard Francis-Jones
Producer and Audio Editor:                Vanessa Adams
Thanks and Acknowledgement:     Erica Volk