Aaron Betsky: Utopia, monster, city.

In Episode 103 of A is for Architecture, Aaron Betsky discusses his recent book The Monster Leviathan: Anarchitecture, published by MIT Press in January this year. Until recently Professor in the School of Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech, and with previous roles as the President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the author of over 20 books. Aaron directed the Venice architecture biennale in 2008 and now operates as an independent scholar. 

The Monster Leviathan describes an architecture ‘lurking under the surface of our modern world […] an unseen architecture—or anarchitecture […] which haunts in the form of monsters that are humans and machines and cities all at once’ which Betsky suggests ‘are concrete proposals in and of themselves’ and which indicate to us now ways we might ‘construct a better, more sustainable, and socially just future’.

Aaron is on Instagram and LinkedIn and all over the internet, because he’s proper famous. 

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick