Afleveringen
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After the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Koolhaasian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality and bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irénée Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, in his recent book, Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, published by Park Books this year,
The title image of the totem — an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community's investment in it or that, and not from mere symbolism — seems to me to gather in Irénée’s whole project: architecture as something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning.
Isn’t that architecture itself?
Irénée is everywhere online, not much by his own hand, except on Insta. The book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.
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For Immanuel Kant, an aesthetic experience required four conditions: disinterestedness, universality, purposiveness and necessity. Architecture, as such, has always struggled with this, because its appreciation is fundamentally tied to a sense of its utility – as shelter, symbol, status, want – and its designedness evidence of its adherent beauty relative to its purpose.
Artist made architecture of the sort documented in scholar, author, folklorist and former director and curator of SPACES, Jo Farb Hernández's Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, and published by Tra Publishing in April this year, might square the circle. Here we have an extraordinary range of places and spaces that we can approach aesthetically in very Kantian ways. But what are these strange, discrepant heterotopias doing, what brings them about, who are they for and what place do the have in the world of architecture proper?
Jo can be found on her website, with links there to her other online appearances. The book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Jo Farb Hernández - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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What if buildings could free themselves – or be freed by their architects – of the stricture of type, of discrete identity, of typology? What might happen if, for example, a school and a house - schoolness and houseness – were hybridized? What if building and non-building, even, were wedded? Might this, perhaps, offer a way to negotiate, heal even, the nature-architecture divide?
This is not pompous and pretentious speculation, but the proposal of Winka Dubbeldam, founder-director of Archi-Tectonics and director and CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), in her recent edited book, Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, published by Park Books in 2025, and featuring essays by Winka, Justin Korhammer, Thom Mayne, Carlo Ratti and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen. It is also the modus operandi of her and Justin Korhammer’s New York, Los Angles and Hangzhou practice, Archi-Tectonics.
Winka and I talk all this, and intriguing and inspiring it is. For new conditions, we probably need new typologies and a taxonomy agile enough to meet a swiftly tilting planet.
Here is Winka at work and university. The book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Hybrid Stadium & Concert Hall, by SFAP.
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In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, about his 2025 book, Lost London: From Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, a History in 25 Missing Buildings, published by Yale University Press in April this year.
Lost London’s provocative move is to insist that ordinary buildings — a pub in Poplar, a roadhouse on a bypass, a block of council flats in Hackney — deserve the same analytical attention as a Wren church or a Robert Adam terrace. As one perhaps should expect from an urban geographer, this pushes back against the exquisite art-historical approach, which treats buildings as art objects and thereby frames architectural history around consecrated geniuses and great buildings. It is a seductive approach, for sure, but perhaps troubling in a different way. If everything means something to someone, how can we knock anything down at all?
Paul is not much online, the lucky fella. You can find him on Grokipedia though. The book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives – Colombia Road Market.
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In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and historian, Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, about her 2024 book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, published by Yale University Press.
Sampling only the most tantalizing soupçon of the book’s ideas, Vanessa and I discuss the relationship between the French Communist Party and postwar modernist architects, and how for them concrete served not just as a symbol of avant-garde taste but also political commitment. Architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Renée Gailhoustet, Paul Chemetov and Patrick Bouchain, and the networks of actors and actants, programs and artefacts that were activated to deliver social housing and cultural and working spaces in communist municipalities across France, as a means of delivering, ultimately, a countersociety of architects that sought to put a new vision of modernism to work towards a better version France’s nascent Fifth Republic.
Vanessa can be found at work here and she’s on the socials too; the book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Jean Biaugeaud, showing the hall of the Raspail housing tower by Renée Gailhoustet, 1968.
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In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and scholar, Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University and director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab), about her edited volume, After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms, published by Springer in 2025.
In our conversation, Asma speaks about the close link between modern architecture, urbanism and the extraction, production and consumption of oil, what Peter Droege, I think, termed Fossil City.
Asama – and the book – however, are concerned now with the next thing: as economies look to shift away from their reliance on oil, what should and can we do with oil’s infrastructure?
So intrinsic to the making of the present human condition, indeed to the social and cultural making of the last 120 years, are we not obliged to consider it a repository of history, like any other significant material culture? And nothing has been more important than oil, for sure, except perhaps the wars for it, so doesn’t it deserve some sort of memorialisation too?
Asma can be found at work here; the book is linked above.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Wikimedia. Pumpjack east of Andrews, TX (2009) by Zorin09.
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In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to scholar, activist, author and feminist totem, Leslie Kern, about Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which she published with Verso in 2022. In Leslie and my conversation we speak broadly about her work and approach, some themes from the book, and how resistance is not just necessary, but possible too.
in 1964 Ruth Glass, in her introduction to London: Aspects of Change, named the phenomenon: ‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes—upper and lower. Shabby, ‘modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. […] Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed […] The invasion has since spread.’
Glass implied that what is presented as urban improvement is in fact a reassertion of class hierarchy in spatial form. In recent years things have moved on, away from what might be seen as an evolutionary process of cultural and economic enrichment , where artists, bohemians, thinkers and web designers find space for their creative praxis. Now the market makes it, and the government spends its taxes to make it more likely to occur.
Leslie can be found on her website, linked above, as is the book.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing via links in the podcast description.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Ambrose Gillick.
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Frederick Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, artist and theorist who, born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, bore witness to the irresistible rise of modernism in architecture and alongside it, the pyrrhic victory of amoral, individuated thinking, revealed so starkly in the mania of colonialism and the horrors of its implosion in the first half of the twentieth century.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and Gerd Zillner, Director of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, about the great man, and particularly about his hitherto unpublished opus, Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, compiled between 1944–1946 and now published for the first time by MIT Press.
Conceived as a Neo-Vitruvian treatise, and an implicit rival to Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture from 1923, at the heart of the book is Kiesler's central concept of magic architecture which rejected the functionalism and efficiency of Corb, Buckminster Fuller, and modern planning. Instead, Kiesler proposed an alternative history of housing grounded in magic, ritual, dream, and the integration of animal instinct with human creativity, arguing that the deepest purpose of architecture is not physical shelter but spiritual and psychological protection — the creation of dwellings that answer humanity's fundamental fears, desires, and sense of the unknown. So, prescient indeed.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Bellerophon, son of Poseidon and Eurynome, slew the Chimera and, full of hubris, believed he had a rightful place on Mount Olympus among the gods and set off there on his winged horse, Pegasus. Zeus did not like this and sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, which threw Bellerophon, who fell back to Earth and died.
The story of modernism has maybe been a little tinged by hubris too. We have defeated all the monsters, presented an architecture and urbanism which proclaims it will do away with social and pathological ills, if only we would let it, and thus deserves a place among the deities. But perhaps, as covid showed, modernism has somewhat over-played its hand. The monsters got amongst us again.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast - the 200th - I spoke to the great architectural historian and theorist, Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University, about some small parts of the recently published book, Sick Architecture, which she edited with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture and published with MIT Press. In the book, 35 essays from around the world present ways architecture has both engaged with sickness as illness, but also as structure, logic and motivation.
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Borja Sanchez-Trillo/Comunidad de Madrid via Getty Images.
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If one were to be the sort of inelegant person to point such things out, one might point out that despite all the egalitarian rhetoric, we still live in an architectural culture that cultivates dominance, not in the sense of dominion as rooted in domus, home, but in the dual senses of control and territory. The star architects we are assured we must look to, the big, bold, challenging buildings they erect, condition folk to see a casual way of acting act relative to ecologies, economies, cultures and justice as normative, ideal, something to believe in.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Professor Hilde Heynen professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Professor Lucia Pérez-Moreno, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza in Spain.
Together, Hilde and Lucia have gathered together a number of Hilde’s most significant essays in a new book, Architecture & Feminist Critical Theory: Selected Writings by Hilde Heynen, published by Leuven University Press in 2025 and which tracks an evolving position, which emerges out of critical theory into feminist theory and latterly towards an environmental justice, but always proposing another way of seeing things in search of another path, one that is subtle, integrated, just and with just a little less man character energy.
Hilde is on LinkedIn can be found at work, Lucia does do the socials and can be found on Instagram and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Source: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man.
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Despite the fact that theorists probably live in one, homes are rather poorly theorized. Why is this so? Perhaps it is the ascent of the domestic in capitalist bourgeois culture – the world within a world – that makes them the seat of late modernity’s subjective turn which, in its turn, made home personal, and therefore ungeneralisable. Who knows.
What I do know is that architect, writer and associate professor in the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, New York, Stefan Al has written a new book on them, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home, published with W. W. Norton but nine days ago on April 14th 2026, and which makes for the subject of this newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast.
Dwelling on Earth is a good book beautifully illustrated by David M. Dugas spanning two million years, from the caves and huts of our forebears to high-rises to 3D-printed houses of… tomorrow? Structured around the four major transformations that we use to describe human history - agriculture, urbanity, industry and now, sustainability, the book poses another meta question, one architects and writers have reflected upon more than somewhat: What is it to dwell? And, to be precise, is a home different to a house?
Stefan can be found at work here, on his own website here and on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: Main: Marrakech, ©David M. Dugas.
#ArchitecturePodcast #DwellingOnEarth #ArchitectureOfHome #ArchitecturalTheory #FutureOfHousing
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Nine out of ten architectural practices in Europe are involved in designing private housing, according to the Architects Council of Europe, with the work generating 54% of the average practice’s turnover. But according to RIBA, in 2018 in the UK only 6% of housing was designed by architects. So housing is incredibly important to the economy of a profession which is very marginal to the production of housing in general. How did we get here?
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast I spoke to an architect and their client, or a client and their architect, about a project which perhaps illustrates another way of doing things. Working together, architect and Lecturer in Architecture Technology at Newcastle University, John Kinsley, and client (and Director at StorytellingPR) Miriam Attwood discuss their scheme for a collective custom build home in Leith, Scotland.
It’s a good story well told of another image of housing, one which adopts a typology, form, material and technology - and a process of design – design-as-relationship - which positions the house in service to the community it is for, and preferences home making above money makers.
As the Bruderhof like to say, another life is possible.
John can be found on John Kinsley Architects’ website and on LinkedIn. Miriam can be found there too and at StorytellingPR.
Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: Main: Model of collective custom build, Leith © John Kinsley Architects.
#ArchitecturePodcast #HousingDesign #CustomBuild #CollectiveHousing #waltersegal
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Close study of singular aspects of building culture remains the mainstay of good architectural scholarship. Through detail, universals can be revealed. This is the case with Tim Altenhof’s Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings, published by Zone Books in March this year (distributed by Princeton University Press), the subject of the latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode.
Breathing Space is an elegant exploration of the role of breath – breathing – in the development of buildings, and the way consciousness of the human lung has shaped architectural design, not least in the emergence of analogies between buildings and bodies.
Our discussion of a little of Tim’s book focuses on the concept of ‘respiratory modernism’, examining how architecture engaged with the body, air and atmosphere in response to wider social, scientific and political concerns around health and the modern city. How were these ideas communicated to the public? And how does this thinking around breathing, bodies, environment and habitation come to us now, in this age of ultramodernism?
Tim is Tim Altenhof is an architect and senior scientist at the University of Innsbruck. He can be found at work, on his own website and on Instagram. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: Main: Luckenwalde Dye Works © Tim Altenhof (2023), Author photo: © Bengt Stiller.
#ArchitecturePodcast #BreathingSpaceArchitecture #RespiratoryModernism #ArchitectureAndHealth #ArchitecturalTheory
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With warfare seemingly creeping up on us – because governments keep starting them – it seemed like a good idea to speak to Ed Wall, Professor of Cities and Landscapes at the University of Greenwich, about his book Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit from Destruction and Reconstruction, published by Jovis in December last year.
It’s difficult to know what to say about this, beyond what Professor Wall describes in the book: there is a seam of architectural practice which makes the infrastructure of war and reconstruction, and makes a good deal of good business whilst doing it. Isn’t it better, one might ask, that architects, with their designerly imaginations, their theories and lovely drafting skills, and their spatial-technical and ecological competencies, are involved in this sort of stuff? At least then it’ll have passive ventilation.
Jeremy Bentham – not an architect – drew the panopticon in the Eighteenth Century and in so doing arguably more-or-less defined the modernist city. The great Alfred - Waterhouse designed Strangeways in the 19th, and that’s pretty lit. Then there was Speer, of course, in the Twentieth. So the connection isn’t new. It still feels odd, though, as Ed explains…
Ed can be found at work, on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
#ArchitectureForWarfare #DesignEthics #UrbanReconstruction
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In Episode 194 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, architect and writer and Andreas Lechner, Associate Professor of Design and Building Theory at TU Graz in Austria and founder of Studio Andreas Lechner, also based in Graz. We connected off the back of my previous conversation with Hans van der Heijden – with whom he had spoken on Drawing Matters last summer.
Specifically, Andreas and I spoke about his book, Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (Park Books 2021), a book which combines theoretical reflection on architectural teaching with an illustrated visual atlas of 144 projects – all drawn orthographically and with no photographs – which serves as invitation to explore architectural design through the lens of typology – somewhat maligned in an age of humanised fun, grandiosity, pomp and intellectual frilliness - arguing as I read it for something a bit more normal - the primacy of form as the core of the discipline.
Andreas’s practice can be found here, and he is on LinkedIn and Instagram. His conversation with the super Hans on Drawing Matters is here. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: 1: © Andreas Lechner, 2: © Andreas Lechner, Park Books, 3 © TU Graz.
#ArchitecturalTypology #ThinkingDesign #ArchitecturePodcast #BuildingTypology #AndreasLechner
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In the 193rd episode of this here A is for Architecture Podcast, Lee Ivett joined me for a second time, 1591 days since his last appearance here. Now a Professor and Head of the London School of Architecture, and still an active architect, I wanted to speak to Lee to discuss architectural education and practice life.
As architecture’s professional bodies push for recognition and reform, whilst governments – or their financial backers – who knows - seemingly push back, it appears like the profession is at an inflection point. Lee argues for a radical shift in how we train the next generation and, with style, describes the urgent need for a more responsive, integrated education.
Stuck in a world of materials, flows, logistics, finance, risk and policy, architecture is a cumbersome beast. But, I think Lee would suggest, it’s also too important to abandon in favour of neoliberal indifference and a ‘trust the market’ fundamentalism if we are to retain or remake good urban space.
Instead, in a world of rapid change and technological shocks, architecture has to move beyond both aesthetics-first or tech-fix positions and towards critical inquiry and research-led architecture that tries to make the world better.
Lee can be found at work here, and on Instagram as Baxendale here. Other People’s Dreams can be found here.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: Main: Ecaterina Stefanescu. Second: Jack Bolton. Third: Lucy Strange/ LSA.
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In Episode 192 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Itohan Osayimwese, Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and Urban Studies and Department Chair at Brown University, discusses small parts of her big book, Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage, published with Princeton University Press in October last year.
In our conversation, Itohan argues that during the age of European empire, colonizers not only expropriated African art and artifacts but systematically – strategically - dismembered buildings, removing them piece-by-piece. In doing so, structural and ornamental components became, in the alienating setting of European and North American museums, reduced to craft artefacts, denuded of weight and depth of cultural knowledge and meaning. This fragmentation, Itohan argues, has contributed to scholarly and popular silences about African architectural histories, erasing built environments as sites of cultural expression, social life and technological innovation. The book reframes these displaced elements as architecture proper, challenging stereotypes that reduce African building traditions to tasteful ethnographic curiosities, arguing instead that they might be better seen as potential tools for restitution and repair.
Itohan can be found at work here. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credits: Main: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; Book cover: ©Martin Franken
#AfricanArchitecture #ColonialLoot #CulturalHeritage #RestitutionAfrica #DecolonizingArchitecture
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The A is for Architecture Podcast’s 191st episode is a conversation with two professors, Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius, about their and Guttorm Ruud’s publication, Architecture and Welfare: Scandinavian Perspectives, which came out with Birkhäuser in 2025.
To summarise the book is hard, composed as it is of twenty essays by different authors exploring aspects of postwar Scandinavian architecture and the role it played in materialising welfare state ideals, giving spatial form to principles of equality, collectivism and democracy. Today, as the political consensus around universal welfare has been weakened from within and without, the book asks us to think again of that peculiar and in some ways utopian architectural legacy, examining its contested past and uncertain future, and positioning it as a subject not just for historians, but as a model that still challenges and instructs.
Ellen is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Copenhagen and is there and on LinkedIn; Thordis is professor of architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
#ArchitecturePodcast #WelfareArchitecture #ScandinavianArchitecture #PostwarArchitecture #WelfareState
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For Episode 190 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Alexander Josephson, architect, lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, and in 2012, co-founder of PARTISANS, a Toronto-based collective of architects, designers and thinkers that, among other things, is currently collaborating on the renewal of the Hearn Generating Station, a massive decommissioned power plant on Toronto’s waterfront, projected to hold the largest gallery space in North America as part of its transformation into 'a city in a building'. The practice’s works are regularly featured in global design publications.
Alex also founded Cumulus, a tech start-up that provides ‘an immersive digital archive of photos, videos and files in a memory cloud that clients can share with loved ones’, a sort-of archive of the virtual, a digital ossuary, if you will. For an architect, this is the ultimate Latourian-turn, I guess.
Alex can be found on PARTISANS’ website, on LinkedIn and Instagram. Cumulus is here.
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick
#ArchitecturePodcast # #AlexJosephson #PARTISANSarchitecture #InnovativeArchitecture #TorontoArchitect
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For this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Amica Dall, co-founder of Assemble, writer and researcher, and Frances Northrop, head of community economic power at the New Economics Foundation and a director of Totnes Community Development Society discuss Common Treasures (Vol. 1 & 2), published by Little Toller Books in 2025.
Common Treasures was founded in 2025 by members & collaborators of Assemble to explore challenges in rural communities through practical, grassroots responses. Its aim is to enable rural communities, landowners, housing providers, and local authorities to achieve better shared outcomes for the people living and working there, and the land they live on. The books documents emerging conversations exploring alternative approaches to rural housing, land, food systems, and livelihoods.
It’s spatial, programmatic, projective, social and organisational, and as such it’s designerly. So we talk about some of that.
Socially, Amica can be gotten on LinkedIn and via Assemble. Frances is more distributed, electronically, and can be found on the NEF site, on LinkedIn and Instagram.
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Music credit: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Kaye Song
#ArchitecturePodcast #RuralFutures #AlternativeRuralHousing #CommonTreasuresBook #CommunityLedDesign
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