Podcast
A is for Architecture Podcast
Hosted by Ambrose Gillick · EN
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. To keep it free and good, subscribe to the podcast on Patreon.
The podcast is not affiliated with Ambrose's place of works.
17episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Timothy Soar: Images of architecture.
1w ago01:04:28Tap to summarizeAs George Berkeley almost almost said, if architecture is built in a city but no one takes its picture, does it make a sound? Photography is intrinsic to architecture, so much so that most of us only know buildings through the images made of them. What the photographer does then is to manifest architecture in the general imagination; arguably, it makes buildings architecture, elevating it beyond context and into objects: known, identifiable and desired. That means the photograph has in itself meaning, which in turn lends photography ethical content. So it’s an important job. It needs to be done well. To do it well requires skill and craft.What though is a good photograph? To answer that, I spoke to architectural photographer Tim Soar, about his work, his philosophy, artistry, ethics and the mastery required of his method. Beginning in social photography, Tim’s is a lovely story of pursuing technical precision and emotional depth to convey architects’ visions and buildings’ social life. Tim can be found on his website, on Instagram and LinkedIn. 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 credits: © Timothy Soar. Main: Gloucester Services by Glenn Howells Architects, 2016, photographed for Architecture Today.# #ArchitecturalPhotography #TimSoar #ArchitecturePhotography #VisualCulture #ArchitecturePodcast
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Irénée Scalbert: Earth City Architecture.
3w ago01:11:57Tap to summarizeAfter the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Koolhaasian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality and bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irénée Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, in his recent book, Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, published by Park Books this year,The title image of the totem — an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community's investment in it or that, and not from mere symbolism — seems to me to gather in Irénée’s whole project: architecture as something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning. Isn’t that architecture itself?Irénée is everywhere online, not much by his own hand, except on Insta. 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 Gillick Image credit: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.
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Jo Farb Hernández: Artists as architects.
Jun 2600:52:23Tap to summarizeFor Immanuel Kant, an aesthetic experience required four conditions: disinterestedness, universality, purposiveness and necessity. Architecture, as such, has always struggled with this, because its appreciation is fundamentally tied to a sense of its utility – as shelter, symbol, status, want – and its designedness evidence of its adherent beauty relative to its purpose.Artist made architecture of the sort documented in scholar, author, folklorist and former director and curator of SPACES, Jo Farb Hernández's Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, and published by Tra Publishing in April this year, might square the circle. Here we have an extraordinary range of places and spaces that we can approach aesthetically in very Kantian ways. But what are these strange, discrepant heterotopias doing, what brings them about, who are they for and what place do the have in the world of architecture proper?Jo can be found on her website, with links there to her other online appearances. 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 Gillick Image credit: Jo Farb Hernández - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.
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Winka Dubbeldam: Architecture and hybridity.
Jun 1800:53:25Tap to summarizeWhat if buildings could free themselves – or be freed by their architects – of the stricture of type, of discrete identity, of typology? What might happen if, for example, a school and a house - schoolness and houseness – were hybridized? What if building and non-building, even, were wedded? Might this, perhaps, offer a way to negotiate, heal even, the nature-architecture divide?This is not pompous and pretentious speculation, but the proposal of Winka Dubbeldam, founder-director of Archi-Tectonics and director and CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), in her recent edited book, Monsters and Mutants: Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, published by Park Books in 2025, and featuring essays by Winka, Justin Korhammer, Thom Mayne, Carlo Ratti and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen. It is also the modus operandi of her and Justin Korhammer’s New York, Los Angles and Hangzhou practice, Archi-Tectonics. Winka and I talk all this, and intriguing and inspiring it is. For new conditions, we probably need new typologies and a taxonomy agile enough to meet a swiftly tilting planet. Here is Winka at work and university. 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 Gillick Image credit: Hybrid Stadium & Concert Hall, by SFAP.
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Paul Knox: London, heritage and capital.
Jun 1101:05:30Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, about his 2025 book, Lost London: From Crystal Palace to Heston Airport, a History in 25 Missing Buildings, published by Yale University Press in April this year.Lost London’s provocative move is to insist that ordinary buildings — a pub in Poplar, a roadhouse on a bypass, a block of council flats in Hackney — deserve the same analytical attention as a Wren church or a Robert Adam terrace. As one perhaps should expect from an urban geographer, this pushes back against the exquisite art-historical approach, which treats buildings as art objects and thereby frames architectural history around consecrated geniuses and great buildings. It is a seductive approach, for sure, but perhaps troubling in a different way. If everything means something to someone, how can we knock anything down at all? Paul is not much online, the lucky fella. You can find him on Grokipedia though. 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 Gillick Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives – Colombia Road Market.
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Vanessa Grossman: Architecture and the communists.
Jun 401:09:16Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and historian, Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, about her 2024 book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, published by Yale University Press. Sampling only the most tantalizing soupçon of the book’s ideas, Vanessa and I discuss the relationship between the French Communist Party and postwar modernist architects, and how for them concrete served not just as a symbol of avant-garde taste but also political commitment. Architects like Oscar Niemeyer, Renée Gailhoustet, Paul Chemetov and Patrick Bouchain, and the networks of actors and actants, programs and artefacts that were activated to deliver social housing and cultural and working spaces in communist municipalities across France, as a means of delivering, ultimately, a countersociety of architects that sought to put a new vision of modernism to work towards a better version France’s nascent Fifth Republic. Vanessa can be found at work here and she’s on the socials too; 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 Gillick Image credit: Jean Biaugeaud, showing the hall of the Raspail housing tower by Renée Gailhoustet, 1968.
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Asma Mehan: Architecture in the shadow of oil.
May 2800:45:46Tap to summarizeIn the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to architect and scholar, Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University and director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab), about her edited volume, After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms, published by Springer in 2025. In our conversation, Asma speaks about the close link between modern architecture, urbanism and the extraction, production and consumption of oil, what Peter Droege, I think, termed Fossil City. Asama – and the book – however, are concerned now with the next thing: as economies look to shift away from their reliance on oil, what should and can we do with oil’s infrastructure? So intrinsic to the making of the present human condition, indeed to the social and cultural making of the last 120 years, are we not obliged to consider it a repository of history, like any other significant material culture? And nothing has been more important than oil, for sure, except perhaps the wars for it, so doesn’t it deserve some sort of memorialisation too? Asma 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 Gillick Image credit: Wikimedia. Pumpjack east of Andrews, TX (2009) by Zorin09.
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Leslie Kern: Resisting gentrification.
May 2100:59:09Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to scholar, activist, author and feminist totem, Leslie Kern, about Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which she published with Verso in 2022. In Leslie and my conversation we speak broadly about her work and approach, some themes from the book, and how resistance is not just necessary, but possible too.in 1964 Ruth Glass, in her introduction to London: Aspects of Change, named the phenomenon: ‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes—upper and lower. Shabby, ‘modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. […] Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed […] The invasion has since spread.’Glass implied that what is presented as urban improvement is in fact a reassertion of class hierarchy in spatial form. In recent years things have moved on, away from what might be seen as an evolutionary process of cultural and economic enrichment , where artists, bohemians, thinkers and web designers find space for their creative praxis. Now the market makes it, and the government spends its taxes to make it more likely to occur. Leslie can be found on her website, linked above, as is the book.If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing via links in the podcast description. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Ambrose Gillick.
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Spyros Papapetros and Gerd Zillner: Kiesler: magic, metaphysics and home.
May 1401:09:05Tap to summarizeFrederick Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, artist and theorist who, born at the tail end of the nineteenth century, bore witness to the irresistible rise of modernism in architecture and alongside it, the pyrrhic victory of amoral, individuated thinking, revealed so starkly in the mania of colonialism and the horrors of its implosion in the first half of the twentieth century.In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke with Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and Gerd Zillner, Director of the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, about the great man, and particularly about his hitherto unpublished opus, Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing, compiled between 1944–1946 and now published for the first time by MIT Press.Conceived as a Neo-Vitruvian treatise, and an implicit rival to Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture from 1923, at the heart of the book is Kiesler's central concept of magic architecture which rejected the functionalism and efficiency of Corb, Buckminster Fuller, and modern planning. Instead, Kiesler proposed an alternative history of housing grounded in magic, ritual, dream, and the integration of animal instinct with human creativity, arguing that the deepest purpose of architecture is not physical shelter but spiritual and psychological protection — the creation of dwellings that answer humanity's fundamental fears, desires, and sense of the unknown. So, prescient indeed.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.
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Beatriz Colomina: Architecture as disease and cure.
May 700:55:38Tap to summarizeBellerophon, son of Poseidon and Eurynome, slew the Chimera and, full of hubris, believed he had a rightful place on Mount Olympus among the gods and set off there on his winged horse, Pegasus. Zeus did not like this and sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, which threw Bellerophon, who fell back to Earth and died. The story of modernism has maybe been a little tinged by hubris too. We have defeated all the monsters, presented an architecture and urbanism which proclaims it will do away with social and pathological ills, if only we would let it, and thus deserves a place among the deities. But perhaps, as covid showed, modernism has somewhat over-played its hand. The monsters got amongst us again. In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast - the 200th - I spoke to the great architectural historian and theorist, Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University, about some small parts of the recently published book, Sick Architecture, which she edited with Nick Axel, Guillermo S. Arsuaga and e-flux Architecture and published with MIT Press. In the book, 35 essays from around the world present ways architecture has both engaged with sickness as illness, but also as structure, logic and motivation.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: Borja Sanchez-Trillo/Comunidad de Madrid via Getty Images.
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