A is for Architecture Podcast

In Episode 27/ 2 of A is for Architecture Bryan Cantley speaks about his very extraordinary body of work, beautifully documented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual, published by Routledge earlier this month. Bryan is Professor of 3-Dimensional Design at the Department of Visual Arts at California State University, Fullerton, and founder/ director of Form:uLA, an experimental architecture, design, and graphic communication studio. As the blurb has it, ‘Cantley’s work offers a unique and critical insight into the emergence of a liminal territory that exists between the real and the virtual that mainstream architecture has yet to exploit.’  Speculative Coolness documents Bryan’s extraordinary, imaginative and alluring architectures, with essays by other leading theorists and writers discussing it import and impact. Aaron Betsky said eight years ago, ‘experimental architecture is a marginal phenomenon, pursued by a few brilliant, but isolated figures: Perry Kulper or Bryan Cantley come to mind’. No so marginal now, is it? Listen, share and subscribe to the show on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.   Speculative Coolness is available on the Routledge website here. Bryan is to be found on the CSUF website here and on Instagram as both bcantl3y and speculativecoolness. His own website, bryancantley.com, features a 20% discount code for the book you’d be wise to use (till 30/4/23). Bryan’s previous book, Mechudzu: New Rhetorics for Architecture, published by Springer Verlag GmbH in 2011. Bryan will be speaking on Speculative Coolness at UCLA in May this year. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

Episode 26 of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with architect, urbbanist and writer Reinier de Graaf, partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), about his recent book, architect, verb: The New Language of Building, published by Verso in February this year. In ten chapters, architect, verb covers much ground, from sustainability and beauty, to starchitecture and gentrification, and aims ‘to debunk myths projected onto architecture by the outside world’ […] Once a profession known for its manifestos, architecture finds itself increasingly forced to adopt ever-more extreme postures of virtue, held accountable by the world of finance, the social sciences or the medical sector.’ It’s a funny book, and provocative too, but fundamentally, as Reiner says in this episode, his passion and criticality is born out of a love for architecture and ‘a sincere love for the profession.’ Have a listen and share, and subscribe to the show.   You can find architect, verb: The New Language of Building on Verso’s website here, and Reinier on OMA’s website here. There’s a gloss on the book on OMA’s website here. I have long read Reinier’s work, and you might too: start with his previous book, Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, published by Harvard University Press in 2017. There’s an article on Dezeen from February that you might read too. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 25/2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Head of School and Chief Executive of the London School of Architecture, Neal Shasore and Jessica Kelly, Reader in Architectural & Design History at University of the Creative Arts (UCA) and (also) teacher at London Metropolitan University, about their edited anthology, Reconstruction: Architecture, Society and the Aftermath of the First World War, published by Bloomsbury in February this year. Our conversation addresses some of the overarching themes in the book, which features ‘[s]ixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars [about] a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation’, revealing ‘how the architectural developments of this period not only provided important foundations for what happened after 1945’, but also saw the emergence of new typologies, styles and practices responsive to a damaged but renewed - and global - society. Critical but ever sophisticated, this is a much needed shot of Edwardian elegance in the rippling Po-PoMo arm of this series. You can find Reconstruction of Bloomsbury’s website here, ready for your coin or plastic. Neal’s LSA profile is here, and his LinkedIn and Twitter are here and here and his Insta is here. There’s a video of Neal giving a lecture for the Architecture Foundation on his previous book, Designs on Democracy: Architecture & The Public In Interwar London on the YouTube here. Jessica’ UCA profile is here, here LinkedIn is here and her Twitter is here. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

A is for Architecture’s Episode 24, Season 2, is a conversation with Patrick Lynch, founder and director of Lynch Architects, writer, scholar and guv’nor (with Claudia Lynch) of Canalside Press.  We spoke about a few of Patrick’s written works, and some of Lynch Architect’s recent built projects too, focusing the discussion around Patrick’s discussions of the ground of architecture.   Being-With/A Tacit Alliance: Architecture, Publishing, and the Poetic Reciprocity of Civic Culture in The Hybrid Practitioner Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), eds. C. Voet, E. Schreurs and H. Thomas, published by Leuven University Press. Situated Praxis, Prudence, and the Anonymity of Beauty: On Tension and Metaphor in the Civic Art of Neave Brown in Part of a City: The Work of Neave Brown Architect, (2022) eds. P. Lynch, C. Lynch and D. Porter, published by Canalside Press. Progress is a Myth, Change is the Reality: The Fossil Poetics of Robin Walker (2018) in Change is the Reality: The Work of Robin Walker Architect (2018), eds. P. Lynch and S. Walker, published by Canalside Press. Civic Ground: Rhythmic Spatiality and the Communicative Movement between Architecture, Sculpture and Site (2017), by Patrick Lynch, published by Artifice Books on Architecture. Our discussion covers a little of Patrick’s multifarious interests and concerns, and includes Neave Brown, urban change, housing, civility, context and theology, as well as The Zig Zag Building, Kings Gate, and n2 & Nova Place, all in London, and all quite recent. It’s all good. Have a sticky. You’ll find the texts we touch on at the links above, where you can buy them, or download them. Lynch Architect’s website is here and their Twitter is here, Patrick’s profile at London Met is here, his LinkedIn is here and his Instagram is here.   Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 23, Season 2 of A is for Architecture, I spoke with UC San Diego professors, Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz about their two recent books, Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up, published by MIT Press in August 2022 and March 2023 respectively. Fonna and Teddy run Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a ‘a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego, who investigate ‘issues of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture […] Blurring conventional boundaries between theory and practice, and merging the fields of architecture and urbanism, political theory and urban policy, visual arts and public culture’ [leading] urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond’. Fonna is Professor of Political Science and Teddy is Professor of Public Culture and Urbanism at UC San Diego, where they also co-direct the Centre on Global Justice and the X-Border Lab. Both books are well worth a read, and are full of thoughtful, practice-based insights and provocations, drawing on a rich, political interpretation of the spatial conditions of exclusion found in a very extreme condition. Spatializing Justice is ‘a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice’. Socializing Architecture follows this, urging architects and urbanists ‘to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization.’ Big, important stuff, so be a diamond and have a listen. You’ll find Spatializing Justice and Socializing Architecture on the MIT Press website, linked above, where you can buy them. Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman’s website is here, with more information on their work and practice to be found all over the internet; their Instagram is here, Fonna’s LinkedIn is here, Teddy’s UC San Diego profile is here, Fonna’s is here. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

Season Two’s twenty-second episode features Kim Dovey, Professor and Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, speaking about his very wonderful body of work on informality, informal urbanism, place and placemaking. We discuss his forthcoming Atlas of Informal Settlement: Understanding Self-Organized Urban Design (Bloomsbury 2023, with, Matthijs van Oostrum, Tanzil Shafique, Ishita Chatterjee and Elek Pafka), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities (Routledge 2018), and Becoming Places: Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power (Routledge 2010), and just one of his marvellous papers, Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements (2020, Habitat International, with van Oostrum, Shafique, Chatterjee and Pafka). Kim is fantastic, of course, at describing the most common form of urban form and housing type of all: ‘In a formal urban design and planning process, the urban design and planning comes first, and then the architecture follows. In an informal process, in the most informal of informal settlements, the architecture comes first, or tends to come first. So the people just build buildings. And if you like the, the street network is then an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the whatever's whatever spaces are left after the buildings are produced. But then, there's a lot of processes, which are much more mixed on that as well.’ For more like that, listen and learn. You can get Mapping Urbanities andBecoming Places from the Routledge website here and here, and bookmark this link to the Bloomsbury website for August, when the Atlasdrops. Kim’s can be found on the Melbourne School of Design here, and on ResearchGate here. Kim co-leads the Informal Urbanism Research Hubtoo. Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 21, Season 2 of A is for Architecture I spoke with Maurice Mitchell and Bo Tang, respectively Professor and Reader of/ in Architecture, within the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University, and together directors of Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources [A R C S R], an ‘an emergent, studio based, teaching and research area within the practice and academic discipline of architecture’. I got to hear about their 2017 book, Loose Fit City: The Contribution of Bottom-Up Architecture to Urban Design and Planning, published by Routledge, which is ‘about the ways in which city residents can learn through making to engage with the dynamic process of creating their own city. It looks at the nature and processes involved in loosely fitting together’. The idea of loose in the sense of [a] loose fit city, Bo suggests in our conversation, may be defined as ‘bringing together different intentions, or allowing them to come together in a way that more than one party is able to contribute to the conversation, to the decision making process, to have a voice across scale, across time to try and come to an understanding of shared matters of concern that may then lead to a civic assembly’. As before, lovely guests, a wonderful, inspiring book and proper, easy conversation. Listen, share, want, get. You can get Loose Fit City off the Routledge website here but also elsewhere online. Bo can be found on the London Met website here, and Maurice here. Bo is here on Twitter, and here on LinkedIn. There's a boss video of Maurice giving an online lecture for the Architecture Foundation on Laurie Baker and Balkrishna Doshi here.   Thanks for listening. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In Episode 20, Season 2 of A is for Architecture’s I spoke with Flora Samuel, Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, holding the professorial chair and until recently, professor at and founding member of Reading School of Architecture, University of Reading about Housing for Hope and Wellbeing, published by Routledge this year which, Flora said, is ‘the best one I ever wrote, I think, & certainly the cheapest.’. Flora was elected the first RIBA Vice President for Research in 2018 and has been instrumental in the development of the Urban Room movement in Britain, through her CCQOL research project on community consultation through mapping. She co-authored Public Participation in Planning in the UK for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Excellence and also wrote the very well received Why Architects Matter in 2018, also by Routledge.  Housing, Flora says is ‘really a very slippery subject, isn't it? It's the one about which we all intimately know a lot from our own lived experience, but has been very poorly studied […] because it's very difficult to make comparisons, you can never compare one bit of housing over the other because everything is different. So it's not a tidy like hospital or something like that’.  Tidy, like a hospital. So is this episode, so enjoy it.  Flora is a significant voice in the British architecture scene and there’s much on and by her online and in paper. Have a look around, for sure. There’s a good video – The Social Value of Design - of Flora and Peter Murray speaking for New London Architecture here.  Flora is lively on Twitter here, and her LinkedIn is here.  Thanks for listening.  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +  Music credits: Bruno Gillick  + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +  aisforarchitecture.org  Available on iTunes/ Apple, Spotify, Google and Amazon.

Episode Nineteen of A is for Architecture’s second season is a conversation with Mae’s founding director, Alex Ely, talking about his practice’s recent book, Towards a Resilient Architecture, published by Quart in 2022. Mae’s work has an increasing focus on sustainability integrated into the whole life of the scheme. As Alex put it when we spoke, ‘I suppose reflecting on 21 years of practice, I suddenly sort of recognise that, in every project we've done, there's been an element of inquiry or hunting for alternative ways of doing things that might lend themselves to more sustainable solutions. That's not to say that environmental architecture has always been at the forefront of our mind. But the point about the book was actually saying: Right, now it needs to be, and we need as a practice to step up. But then so does the industry.’ You can get Towards a Resilient Architecture off the Quart website here but also elsewhere online. You can have a look at Mae’s built work on their website and all the online magazines too, but of particular pertinence to our discussion are their Sands End Arts & Community Centre, Fulham, their proposal for the Oxford to Cambridge Corridor and the John Morden Centre, Blackheath. Alex’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here; Mae’s is here. Mae’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, and Pinterest is here. Cheers! + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk

In episode 18, season 2 of A is for Architecture, I met (on Zoom…) with Ed Parham, Director of Design & innovation at Space Syntax, to talk about its origins, objectives, methods and motivations. Space Syntax, the brainchild of Bill Hiller, formed as the Space Syntax Laboratory at The Bartlett, University College London, and now led by Tim Stonor, is ubiquitous in architectural thinking, almost a shorthand for any form of data-led complex spatial analysis. I wanted to understand it better, and Ed, as an architect, seemed like the ideal person to unpack it for a naïf like me. Space Syntax describe their work as providing ‘a science-based and human-focused approach to the urban planning and design process. We help people to see, in clear and straightforward terms, how buildings and urban places can be designed to optimise their functional performance.’ Ed and I spoke about Space Syntax’s work at Astana/Nur-Sultan work, which you can watch on YouTube here, and the AD article, Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City. You can read Bill Hiller’s seminal text, Space is the Machine, at spaceisthemachine.com, and here’s a lovely essay, A Tribute to Bill Hillier, given at the 13th Space Syntax Symposium, in 2020, by Margarita Greene, Tao Yang, Vinicius Netto, Ruth Conroy Dalton, Sophia Psarra and Frederico De Holanda. Ed’s professional profile is here, and his LinkedIn is here. Space Syntax’s Instagram is here, their Twitter is here, YouTube here, LinkedIn here and Facebook here. Listen ‘n’ learn. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Music credits: Bruno Gillick + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + aisforarchitecture.org Apple: podcasts.apple.com Spotify: open.spotify.com Google: podcasts.google.com Amazon: music.amazon.co.uk