A is for Architecture Podcast

In the 13th episode of  A is for Architecture’s third series, I spoke with the remarkable architect and writer, Juhani Pallasmaa, former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology, now incorporated as Aalto University. Pallasmaa’s work has been of huge importance to architects now active in the transformation of our towns and cities, with his description of a tactile, material and immanent embodiment visible in the work of almost all good, urban work now being built. His written work particularly stands, in a way, in counterpoint to the superficial and the visual, that occularcentric tendency born of late capitalist starcitecture, and the preferencing of the image over depth and the experiential. Central to our discussion were two of Pallasmaa’s great works – The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and The Thinking Hand (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), both of which are worthy of continued study. You can listen to Jonathan Hale speak about Juhani’s inspiration, the phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on A is for Architecture here. Before he and I recorded this episode, Juhani had received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, at the Sanitorium itself, where he also gave a talk entitled "The Ethical Meaning of Architecture: The relational and existential essence of art". A joy and an undeserved privilege, getting to speak to a hero like this. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 Series 3’s 12th episode of  A is for Architecture I spoke with architect, writer, and thinker Keller Easterling, Enid Storm Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University, about her 2021 book, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, published by Verso. To quote James Graham in the Journal of Architectural Education, ‘Medium Design emerged into a world marked by […] a growing desire for change within the architectural profession. […] Is Medium Design the closing bracket of the 2010s in architectural theory, or a hinge between the “before” and the “after”’. It’s a good question, which Easterling’s book begins to dissect, recognising the language on which the discipline has grown dependent, proposing action in its stead. Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World is available on the Verso website – it’s quite affordable. Keller’s Yale profile is here, and her personal website here. You can watch Keller talk about the work at ETH Zurich in a lecture from a year ago here. Words, words, words, said sharp Hamlet. Well listen, and find out. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 11, series 3 of A is for Architecture I spoke with architect Chris Dyson, principal of Chris Dyson Architects, and Dominic Bradbury, about his (their) new book, Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity, published by Lund Humphries this year. Chris Dyson Architects’ practice has a reputation for sensitive modern work in historic contexts, which the book documents, describing in text and lovely images what the blurb says is the practice’s works’ ‘overriding sense of different elements – be they material, temporal or cultural – coming together into coherent wholes [making] architecture that feels old and new at the same time.’ Chris Dyson Architects: Tradition and Modernity is available on the Lund Humphries website here. Chris’ practice website is here, Instagram here, X here and LinkedIn here. There are a few nice bits online with Chris, such as this profile in Building Design here, and a couple of videos on YouTube - Architects at Home  and one on preserving and enhancing the heritage of The Goodsyard here. Dominic’s website is here; he has written a huge number of books on material culture, which are certainly worth a look. His Instagram is here, LinkedIn here, and X here. Old-new. What a fusion, as Jacques Lu Cont almost put it. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 A is for Architecture’s Episode 10/3 Katrin Bohn and André Viljoen – architects, academics and activists – speak about their work on urban agriculture, specifically the idea’s they developed in CPULs Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities, published by Elsiever in 2005, developed and represented in Second Nature Urban Agriculture: Designing Productive Cities, published by Routledge in 2014, and which won the 2015 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding University-located Research. CPULs are part of Bohn and Viljoen’s proposal for ‘a resilient urban entity […] that enables sustainable urban food systems for the pleasure of its individual citizens and the benefits of environment, economy, culture and society as a whole.’ It’s pretty wild as an idea, and a provocation (perhaps), but it might also be the future, one of universal rights to good food, clean air, open space and healthy, collective, vigorous physical labour in the metropolis. And that’s before you even get to work. You can find Bohn & Viljoen’s practice website here where there are links to many useful resources, and links to CPULs is here and Second Nature is here. Andre’s profile at University of Brighton is here, and Katrin’s here. They also linger marginally in the socialmediasphere: you can find Andre on LinkedIn, and Katrin on LinkedIn, too. Yummy cities for the win. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 9/3 of A is for Architecture is a conversation with the architect, artist, writer and teacher, Tom de Paor, ‘one of Ireland’s foremost architects’. We speak about a lot of things, but spend most time thinking about his work Desert/ Dysart, documented beautifully in a book with Peter Maybury, published by Gall Editions as part of Maybury and Paul Clarke’s Notations collection, and due for a significant feature in A+U next spring, and also the Pálás Cinema, Galway, which opened in 2018. Tom’s work is extensive and highly considered, and includes the National Sculpture Factory Cork (1998), Clontarf Pumpstation and landscape (2007), the Druid Theatre, Galway (2009), and a number of submissions to the Venice Architecture Biennale since the inaugural Irish pavilion he designed, the widely celebrated work N3 – ‘a martyrium in peat’. In 2022 dePaor staged the exhibition ‘i see Earth: building and ground: 1991–2021’, curated by Nathalie Weadick, reviewed in The Times here. You might find Desert for sale via Peter Maybury’s website, although the print run was small, so I doubt it. There’s a good review of it – and the series – on Maybury’s website by Michael McGarry writing in Perspective magazine. Tom’s practice website is here and Dysart’s emergence is documented on Instagram as dysart_dysert_disert_desert. Keep your eyes peeled for the feature on it in A+U next year. You can hear/ watch Tom speak about Desert/ Dysart as part of the KU Leuven Faculteit Architectuur’s Going Public YouTube lecture series here, with a lecture called ‘House and Garden’ in 2022, and on the Pálás Cinema at Harvard’s GSD, in a talk entitled “previous, next” from 2017, here. Power springs up, as Hannah Arendt said. So does Tom. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 8, Series 3, is a conversation with a trio of great scholars, Tahl Kaminer, Leonard Ma and Helen Runting, about their recent book, Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City, published by Jovis in July this year. Addressing the ongoing exodus from the inner city apparent across the world and the appropriation of the suburbs by new communities, the book examines ‘the relationship between three current processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the suburbs […] using the examples of four key global European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm.’ You can find the book on the Jovis website here. Tahl’s Welsh School of Architecture profile is here, Helen’s Malmö University profile can be found here, and she’s on Insta and X too. Her practice, Secretary Office for Architecture, is worth a look. Leonard can be found at the Estonian Academy of Arts here, and on Drawing Matter here. Knowledge is power, so listen and learn, and grow in power. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 7/ 3 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with writer, photographer and teacher Paul Dobraszczyk, about his book, Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us, published by Reaktion Books in March this year. Animal Architecture ‘considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human [and] asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures’. That’s what the blurb says, anyway. You can find Paul on X here, Instagram here and at his website here. The book is on the Reaktion website, and you can watch Paul talk about it with UNSW’s Dr Siobhan O'Sullivan on her Knowing Animals podcast on YouTube. Very recently Paul wrote on The Conversation about another pathological effect of big, shiny glass buildings – bird killing. Ah, modernity, you little wonder. Worth a sticky beak, I reckon. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 6/ 3 of A is for Architecture, architect, writer, teacher and researcher, Charlotte Skene Catling talks about her practice Skene Cailtling de la Peña, which she founded in 2003 with Jaime de la Peña. The practice’s work has been widely published and to considerable critical acclaim, blending as it does context, occupation/ use, earth, soil, sedimentation and historic records, in a process they term geoarchaeology. The term has academic connotations, and how this is actualized in Skene Catling de la Peña’s practice is worth hearing told. It particularly fascinating where it touches on Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Toppila silo in Oulu, Finland, which they are turning into a regenerative/ cultural space with the Factum Foundation. You can find Charlotte all over the internet. She wrote a column for the Architectural Review, Domus and The Burlington Magazine, teaches at the London School of Architecture, Instagrams and LinkedIns. There’s a lovely article at Drawing Matter on The Dairy House, excerpted from Françoise Astorg Bollack’s Material Transfers: Metaphor, Craft, and Place in Contemporary Architecture, published by  Monacelli Press in 2020. Have a look at Flint House, which was the RIBA House of the Year 2015, and is covered most stylishly in this Architectural Review vid. Deep stuff. Subterranean, even... Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 5/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Liz Postlethwaite talks about her practice as a participatory artist, permaculture designer and Director of Small Things Creative Projects, a social enterprise with a focus on regenerative culture through designing and writing scaled interventions in public. Permaculture is mimetic, promoting the management of land and habitats by paralleling and replicating natural ecologies. (It’s also more than this, as Liz explains.) It has direct relevance for architecture and practice, reframing the relationship of designers and sites/ context towards greener, more holistic, ethical and slower ways. It also offers a number of simple motifs for understanding the integrated and rhizomatic nature of environments, people, stuff, action and intention. Believe, it’s a good thing, even if you’re not a hippy. You can find Liz online at the Small Things Creative Projects website, and also on Liz’s personal website. Liz runs training and mentoring workshops which you can read about on the Permaculture Association website. Liz is on Instagram as @mudandculture, and can be found on LinkedIn here. Liz writes a Substack, Mud and Culture, which you might want to subscribe to. Listen to the podcast, slowly, repeatedly and thinkily. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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 4/ 3 of A is for Architecture, Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters speak about their practice, Vokes & Peters, and their elegant domestic and civic buildings in the heart and hinterlands of Brisbane. Our discussion sprung from their recent book, Migrations from Memory, a collection of essays by Stuart Vokes and Aaron Peters reflecting upon twenty years of practice, published by Canalside Press in 2023. Vokes & Peters’ domestic work is particularly wonderful, and rightly acclaimed, embodying a civility and civicness that is distinct and significant. There is much online about it. A quote from Stuart from the book’s opening illustrates something of their approach: ‘One can be poetic about a house and describe it as a city in miniature – just like the city, one can find a range of rooms, enabling a range of events and behaviours that satisfy the spectrum of human emotions. But I am equally satisfied with the idea that a house might be considered a room of the city – a room where we feel at home, the one place left in the city where we might find real reverie and contentment. A house needn’t be another public place, at least not always.’ Vokes and Peter are all over the internet, but for one, there’s a decent video on their Auchenflower House (pictured on the podcast image) in Brisbane from 2020 on the Architecture AU website, and you might also have a sticky at their recent Blok Stafford Heights, winner of this year’s New House Under 200 Square Metres in the Houses Awards, and covered in the Guardian. Their own website features an excellent selection of written work too. Both Stuart and Aaron are on Instagram. Migrations from Memory is available on the Canalside Press website and everywhere else that's decent⁠. Listen to the podcast, and work something out. Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music. 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