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A is for Architecture Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Ambrose Gillick
Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with designers, scholars and practitioners, Ambrose unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers the best insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. The podcast is not affiliated with Ambrose's place of works.
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- Yesterday54 min
Antony Wood: Tall buildings and sustainable vertical urbanism.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Antony Wood PhD, Tall Building Expert, Professor of Sustainable Vertical Urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council of Vertical Urbanism, discusses… very tall buildings.The Council of Vertical Urbanism is the body that oversees the certification of the world’s tallest buildings. Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl, to banality to sustainability, new economics, urban identity and branding and even the housing crisis. Nearly ten times as many Supertalls – buildings over 300m, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years. But outside their appeal as objects – big isn’t always beautiful, but it is normally very impressive – what are they for and how do they work as bits of a city?Antony discusses this – where ‘tall’ comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they’re made, what sorts of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better. Anthony can be found through his excellent and popular LinkedIn page and at work where he runs the Masters of Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism. CVU is linked above. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick
- 1 weeks ago53 min
Mabel O. Wilson: Spaces of liberation.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Mabel O. Wilson - architect, historian, and professor at Columbia University, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies - speaks about Thinking from Black: A Lexicon, published by FSG Editions this September. Thinking from Black – a product of the Practicing Refusal Collective, a forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century brings together artists, scholars, poets, architects and activists to build a vibrant, experimental vocabulary for black life, culture and collective imagination. Through cross-referenced and eclectic entries, the book argues for “thinking from Black” as a creative, plural, and liberatory practice rather than a fixed identity—one that refuses deficit-based frameworks and makes room for contradiction, tension, and possibility. Mabel’s work includes books, exhibitions, memorials. You can connect to her via her work, and also LinkedIn and Instagram. The book is linked above. The Practicing Refusal Collective is here.+Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credits: Image 1: © J. Meejin Yoon: Detail of Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. +If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.
- 2 weeks ago1h 26m
JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, poet and Creative Projects Manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, JL Williams, spoke to me about her recent collection of poetry, Strange Architectures, her fifth book of such with Shearsman Books. In the poems, Jennifer presents visions of architectures dreamed and written, taking us the audience over thresholds and into spaces of her – and perhaps our own – inner worlds. The relationships between architecture, the psyche – literally ghost or soul in Greek– and dreamworlds is deep in architecture, manifest I’d argue throughout our modes of imagining and expressing the craft of building design. For Carl Jung, architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche and his dream of a multistorey house helped shape his concept of the collective unconscious. Indeed, the homes he designed gave physical form to his propositions about the relationships between conscious and unconscious life.In this roomy conversation, Jennifer reads her poems, we discuss them, think about space and buildings, their construction, inner-life, motherhood and Jung and a lot of other stuff. It’s a ride, believe.Jennifer can be found on her website here, at work here and on LinkedIn.+Music credits: Bruno GillickImage credit: Image 1: © JL Williams#StrangeArchitectures #ArchitectureAndPoetry #ArchitectureAndPsyche #JungianArchitecture #AisForArchitecturePodcast
- 3 weeks ago1h 6m
Shumi Bose: Words relating to theory.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Shumi Bose, about her work as a curator, chief editor of KoozArch, senior lecturer in architecture at Central Saint Martins in London and, I’d suggest, something like an activist-not-activist. Speaking here, Shumi makes a clear case for the role of critical distance as she has found it – and I’d suggest – used it in her various roles and projects. We speak about Shumi’s journey to architectural teaching and thought, her various initiatives in support of diversified knowledges and justice, and the spaces we can make to model integrity in our work. Shumi can be found at work here and on LinkedIn and Instagram. +If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast via the Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Shumi online. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Image 1: Matthew Blunderfield: Shumi Bose/ Space Popular - Fables for Our Time; Image 2: Special Thanks Studios - Shumi Bose & Space Popular Collaboration; Image 3: Special Thanks Studios: Shumi Bose #ArchitecturePodcast # #ShumiBose #ArchitecturalCriticism #ArchitectureAndActivism #CriticalArchitecture
- 4 weeks ago1h 16m
Maximillian Sternberg: Hans Dollgast: Designing in history
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Max Sternberg discuss the Bavarian architect Hans Döllgast, the subject of his latest book, Hans Döllgast: Reconstruction and Modernity, which is being published by Lund Humphries in late September this year. Born in 1891 and surviving all Germany’s many troubles to 1974, Döllgast is known chiefly for his postwar reconstruction work in Munich. However, Max argues, in this he has been misread. Rather than an ambivalent light touch ruin architect, his post-war reconstructions in fact grew from a consistent ethos of an anti-dogmatic ‘middle ground’ embracing plurality, revealed in history materialised in accumulated city fabric. As such, his work of retaining the war scars of the Alte Pinakothek, for example, serve as an act of resistance to cultural and political amnesia, to wanting to forget and discard.Max 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.+Music credits: Bruno GillickImage credit: ©Michael Gaenßler (1980).#ArchitecturePodcast #HansDollgast #ArchitecturalHistory #PostwarArchitecture #ModernArchitecture
- Aug 28, 202656 min
Ole Bouman: Bicycles, buildings and an ethic of care.
Architecture’s conscience – as building, buildings, materials and practices – is a bolt-on at best, but more often a semantic, sophistic trick. Architecture as a profession talks ethically but it’s very difficult to see where this manifests in real life. This is an agency problem but also a discipline problem – at a profession-level individualism resists collective action to solve broad social problems. At a policy level, any attempt by anybody to suggest architects have some social obligation that impinges on “design” gets shot down. In a May 2026 op-ed for the Journal of Architecture entitled Architecture et Révolution: The Engineered Consent of a Discipline, Ole Bouman, writer, curator, publisher and Professor in the College of Architecture & Urbanism, Tongji University, Shanghai, makes a strong claim: architecture is aligned with delivering the status quo, just as Le Corbusier suggested in it should. Contrary to the general belief that we ask too much of architecture, Bouman suggests perhaps in fact we ask too little.Ole suggests that the polycrisis upon us requires action at the collective level. To illustrate this, he uses the bicycle: no single bicycle fights climate change but "a culture of cycling can,". No project changes anything but the knowledge of the discipline could.Ole’s website is linked here. The essay 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. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: © Ole Bouman via Instagram.
- Aug 20, 20261h 6m
Maria Fusco: Site writing, sensing, place.
As architects, the nature of buildings is as drawings. Even when on site, a building is read in terms of its relationship to the documents off its legal production, preeminent among which – after the contract - are the plan and elevation. As such, the buildings of architects are abstractions. To use Hayles and Gannon, 'design is a mode of practice that represents a reality, but is not the reality it represents.'For others - normal people - perhaps buildings are the sum of their stuff – materials, light, tone, smell, thresholds and transitions - bodily things. In any case, for this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Maria Fusco, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, about her publication, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, published by Vanguard Editions, which describes her study of the Palacio Pombal, Lisbon, which Maria produced for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2017. We discuss this, her work and practice, and hear Maria read parts of the book too.It is an elegant example of how buildings might be understood both through and as bodies, textures and histories, and through a thing other than drawing.Maria’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, at work, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: ‘In-situ courtesy of Maria Fusco'.
- Jul 31, 20261h 12m
Gabriella Bennett: Other possible cities.
What would a failing city look like? Would one be able to tell if, for example, London or New York were a busted flush? What would be the markers? Social discord, unwalkable streets, cultivated inequality and polarization, declining mental and physical health might seem like some measures to test.Perhaps a better question is what would a growing city look like? This, as I read it, is the question Gabriella Bennett seeks to answer in her book, How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future, which is coming out with Headline Press on the 13 August, and documents both her personal story and her explorations of places – from the Ukraine to Tokyo, from Florida to the Arctic - that have begun to remake themselves fit for us now. Given urbanisation, the central claim Bennett makes in How to Build a City is simple and insistent: the shape of where you live shapes the life you lead. Because cities both generate their crises and accelerate them, the act of rebuilding is the central moral and creative problem of any urban future.Gabriella’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, Instagram and LinkedIn. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credits: © Gabriella Bennett. Main: Isometric Hospital Building, SimCity 4 style, from Sprite AI.#HowToBuildACity #UrbanFuture #CityPlanning #UrbanDesign #ArchitecturePodcast
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About A is for Architecture Podcast
Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with designers, scholars and practitioners, Ambrose unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers the best insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. The podcast is not affiliated with Ambrose's place of works.
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