A is for Architecture Podcast

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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credits: © Gabriella Bennett. Main: Isometric Hospital Building, SimCity 4 style, from Sprite AI.
#HowToBuildACity #UrbanFuture #CityPlanning #UrbanDesign #ArchitecturePodcast

As 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. 
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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

After 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.

For 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Jo Farb Hernández - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.

What 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Hybrid Stadium & Concert Hall, by SFAP.