A is for Architecture Podcast

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.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  #ArchitectureForWarfare #DesignEthics #UrbanReconstruction 

Andreas Lechner, Associate Professor at TU Graz and founder of Studio Andreas Lechner, is an architect and author exploring typology and architectural drawing. He discusses the primacy of form, using orthographic drawings as analytical tools. Conversations touch on typology as recurring spatial problems, the balance of tectonics and topos, and how typological clarity enables adaptive reuse.

Lee Ivett, Professor and Head of the London School of Architecture and practitioner behind Other People's Dreams, discusses reforming architectural education and practice. He explores live action research, participatory, durational methods. Conversations cover teaching for industry change, integrating studio and practice, access to hands-on learning, and the contested future of professional regulation.

Itohan Osayimwese, Professor at Brown and author of Africa's Buildings, explores how colonial powers dismantled African architecture and reframed fragments as curiosities. She traces the practice from Roman Egypt to Benin 1897. Conversations cover ornament versus structure, museum alienation, teaching decolonial history, and creative approaches to restitution and reintegration of displaced architectural elements.

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.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #ArchitecturePodcast #WelfareArchitecture #ScandinavianArchitecture #PostwarArchitecture #WelfareState 

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.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #ArchitecturePodcast # #AlexJosephson #PARTISANSarchitecture #InnovativeArchitecture #TorontoArchitect

Amica Dall, co-founder of Assemble and writer/researcher on design, climate and community adaptation; Frances Northrop, community economic power lead at NEF and Totnes development director. They discuss Common Treasures and practical rural responses to housing, land, food systems and livelihoods. Conversations cover grassroots design, local governance, planning barriers, and how small-scale projects scale for social and ecological resilience.

For Episode 188 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Nele De Raedt and Maarten Delbeke discuss some small parts of the 2025 book, Beauty in Architecture: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, which they edited and published with Bloomsbury. Beauty in Architecture connects ideas from across practice and theory that consider how beauty might again become central to architectural discourse. Beauty has re-emerged in public debate, but sadly it remains contested in critical discussions, often treated with suspicion – as an issue of politics, more or less. But, as we discuss, perhaps by taking beauty seriously, architecture might permit of – and articulate - broader reflections on values, identity, class, ecology and the notion of a shared cultural life.Nele is Associate Professor in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and is on LinkedIn and can be found on Instagram at her research group super_positions. Maarten is Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and is on Instagram. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno GillickPhotograph credit: Hong Wan Chan

In Episode 187 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Fernando Lara, professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, discusses his book, Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2024.Spatial Theories for the Americas critiques the dominance of Eurocentric, cartesian and elitist frameworks in architectural and urban studies, imposed through the colonial-modernist project, particularly as they impinge upon the articulation of indigenous practices, spatial knowledges and cultural forms. Fernando argues that these perspectives failed to reflect the unique realities of the American built world as it was when first encountered by Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the legacy of which persists to this day. To address this, the book proposes new theories from multiple disciplines forming a fresh - self-determined – Amerindian vision. Fernando can be found at work here, on his personal website here, on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #ArchitecturePodcast #SpatialTheoriesAmericas #FernandoLuizLara #DecolonialArchitecture #ArchitectureTheory #CriticalUrbanism #BuiltEnvironmentStudies #EurocentrismCritique #IndigenousSpatialKnowledge #ArchitectureAndColonialism

Francis Terry, neoclassical architect and founder of Francis Terry and Associates, famed for hand-drawing and craft-led classical design. He talks about his drawing-led workflow, tensions between modernist training and traditional practice, the politics around classicism, working with craftsmen, and why ornament, materials and permanence still matter.