A is for Architecture Podcast

In latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode Cristian Frost, architect, professor and Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, about his 2025 book, Architecture and Cultural Continuity: The Making of Festival, Experience and Historicity, and published by Bloomsbury.
In our discussion, we approach Christian’s argument that architecture is part of culture, not an expression of it, and that it should be understood as lived experience rather than as form. To recover depth lost in modernism’s architecture, festival – public, civic, ritual and communal – offers deployable insight. Both festival and architecture are experiential, but through festivals cultural languages, values and meaning are materialized. 
Staring with Florence’s Feast of San Giovanni, Christian moves the same analysis onto buildings, arguing that good architecture - like festival - resists co-option, survives ignorance, holds several meanings at once, and is activated by its “ethical core” rather than formal beauty. 
The wider implications of this argument are political: where technological modernity has produced a “tacit” or “aesthetic” colonisation through globalised modernism, recovering the ontological experience of architecture offers a pathway towards cultural decolonisation. 
Christian can be found at work and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
+
 Image credit: © Christian Frost.
Music credits: Bruno Gillick

The latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode is a conversation with Duncan McDuie-Ra, professor and head of school at Monash University, Malaysia campus, about his book, Insurgent Play: Social Worlds of Urban Disruption, published by Anthem Press in July 2025. 
Skateboarding is the basis for Duncan’s and my discussion, a form of skilled play that is minimally bounded by rules, equipment and behaviour and yet remains marginal and, in many places, actively prohibited. Through their play, skateboarders – insurgent players - develop what Duncan refers to as a radical attunement to urban space, ‘to other field forms, assemblages of surfaces and objects that hold no obvious way of playing to people outside the subculture.’ 
Our conversation – and the way I read this book – focuses on ways forms of playing – specifically paidic play – open, spontaneous, unstructured playfulness, but high-skill like skateboarding - operate to uncover alternative readings of the social and spatial character, boundaries and meaning of places, documenting another city in the city, a network of insurgencies, so to speak, produced by edges, steps, boards, underpasses, rails. 
As Duncan writes, through this radical attunement to the possibilities for play, thousands, possibly millions, of otherwise unremarkable, mundane urban spaces are brought to life.. 
Duncan can be found at work and on LinkedIn. 
+
Images: © Duncan McDuie-Ra 
Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast Beth Hughes, Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, spoke with me about, well, all sorts – but mainly how architecture is taught now, what sort of thinkers and doers this produces, and therefore what sort of urbanism and architecture we can expect to get from them. 
The financial and social barriers built into how architects are trained shapes who designs cities and buildings, which changes the shape of the places we end up living in.
To this end, Beth and I discuss Britain’s Architects Registration Board’s proposals to widen access to the profession by reforming the way architects are trained, with many schools now promoting a shorter and less architecturish route to qualification. Others, like the Royal College of Art, are maintaining the existing postgraduate model –a two-year programme. 
It’s an interesting moment, one which see the marketization of higher education marry with student anxieties and concerns about costs and employability, to deliver into an ever-more pressured professional context more deployable graduates from a more representative cross-section of society.
Ultimately, we speak about Beth’s vision – I guess – of what a future mode of practice built by her graduates might look like. 
Beth can be found at work and on LinkedIn. 
+
Image: RCA students Work In Progress show installation, © RCA
Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast architectural totem, Canadian American architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with me about his forthcoming book, What Architecture Is, published by Yale University Press on October 27th this year. Rather than the perhaps more expected question – what is architecture? – Witold turns it and us around. 
What Architecture Is is composed of seven chapters, riffing on John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps – exploring the value of History, Order, Ornament, Meaning, Beauty, Drawing and Place, but answering too to the critics of his 2013 How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, giving us the readers now the framework to judge buildings, and not just explain them. Grappling again with these, perhaps, architecture can find its public and speak to it again, becoming again the home of our collective memory, meaning and experience.
Witold tells his story, which is a good one, and we approach the what and why of his propositions, after a manner, sploshing around in his lovely prose.
Witold can be found at work and on his own website. The book is linked above.  
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick

This episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast features a brace of professors, Cat Rossi and Charles Holland, both of UCA and Charles, Founder director of Charles Holland Architects. We met in the English port town of Dover to discuss Harvest, from the summer to autumn 2025, and Harvest Moon, a round table made from waste harvested within a forty-mile radius of Canterbury, and coproduced since the winter of 2025 with Local Works Studio, in partnership with Steffi Klenz and Stephen Knott of the Crafts Study Centre, Perry Court Farm and Perry Court Farm and Torry Hill Chestnut Fencing.
The Harvest projects are framed by the designer-makers’ awareness of climate and organised around a recurring question — what do we gather, harvest, and give thanks for today? It proposes, after a manner, reconnection through design with growing, seasonality and the harvesting of materials, and the cultures, behaviours and rituals that may descend from them. 
Much is said about processes and programming of space as prerequisites for sustaining interventions – it’s not enough to just make a thing without consideration of the activities it sits within and produces. A table needs a meal, needs a crowd, needs grace, needs a drink. The table then is a curatorial format, as Cat puts it. From this particular, can we postulate a universal? Should we?
Cat can be found at work, on LinkedIn and Instagram; Charles can be found at work here and here, and on LinkedIn and Instagram. Harvest is linked above.
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick