A is for Architecture Podcast

If one were to be the sort of inelegant person to point such things out, one might point out that despite all the egalitarian rhetoric, we still live in an architectural culture that cultivates dominance, not in the sense of dominion as rooted in domus, home, but in the dual senses of control and territory. The star architects we are assured we must look to, the big, bold, challenging buildings they erect, condition folk to see a casual way of acting act relative to ecologies, economies, cultures and justice as normative, ideal, something to believe in.
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Professor Hilde Heynen professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Professor Lucia Pérez-Moreno, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. 
Together, Hilde and Lucia have gathered together a number of Hilde’s most significant essays in a new book, Architecture & Feminist Critical Theory: Selected Writings by Hilde Heynen, published by Leuven University Press in 2025 and which tracks an evolving position, which emerges out of critical theory into feminist theory and latterly towards an environmental justice, but always proposing another way of seeing things in search of another path, one that is subtle, integrated, just and with just a little less man character energy.
Hilde is on LinkedIn can be found at work, Lucia does do the socials and can be found on Instagram and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Source: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Matrix of Man.

Despite the fact that theorists probably live in one, homes are rather poorly theorized. Why is this so? Perhaps it is the ascent of the domestic in capitalist bourgeois culture – the world within a world – that makes them the seat of late modernity’s subjective turn which, in its turn, made home personal, and therefore ungeneralisable. Who knows.
What I do know is that architect, writer and associate professor in the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, New York, Stefan Al has written a new book on them, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home, published with W. W. Norton but nine days ago on April 14th 2026, and which makes for the subject of this newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast. 
Dwelling on Earth is a good book beautifully illustrated by David M. Dugas spanning two million years, from the caves and huts of our forebears to high-rises to 3D-printed houses of… tomorrow? Structured around the four major transformations that we use to describe human history - agriculture, urbanity, industry and now, sustainability, the book poses another meta question, one architects and writers have reflected upon more than somewhat: What is it to dwell? And, to be precise, is a home different to a house? 
Stefan can be found at work here, on his own website here and on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 
Image credits: Main: Marrakech, ©David M. Dugas.  
#ArchitecturePodcast #DwellingOnEarth #ArchitectureOfHome #ArchitecturalTheory #FutureOfHousing

Nine out of ten architectural practices in Europe are involved in designing private housing, according to the Architects Council of Europe, with the work generating 54% of the average practice’s turnover. But according to RIBA, in 2018 in the UK only 6% of housing was designed by architects. So housing is incredibly important to the economy of a profession which is very marginal to the production of housing in general. How did we get here?
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast I spoke to an architect and their client, or a client and their architect, about a project which perhaps illustrates another way of doing things. Working together, architect and Lecturer in Architecture Technology at Newcastle University, John Kinsley, and client (and Director at StorytellingPR) Miriam Attwood discuss their scheme for a collective custom build home in Leith, Scotland. 
It’s a good story well told of another image of housing, one which adopts a typology, form, material and technology - and a process of design – design-as-relationship - which positions the house in service to the community it is for, and preferences home making above money makers.
As the Bruderhof like to say, another life is possible.
John can be found on John Kinsley Architects’ website and on LinkedIn. Miriam can be found there too and at StorytellingPR.
Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 
Image credits: Main: Model of collective custom build, Leith © John Kinsley Architects.  
#ArchitecturePodcast #HousingDesign #CustomBuild #CollectiveHousing #waltersegal

Close study of singular aspects of building culture remains the mainstay of good architectural scholarship. Through detail, universals can be revealed. This is the case with Tim Altenhof’s Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings, published by Zone Books in March this year (distributed by Princeton University Press), the subject of the latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode. 
Breathing Space is an elegant exploration of the role of breath – breathing – in the development of buildings, and the way consciousness of the human lung has shaped architectural design, not least in the emergence of analogies between buildings and bodies. 
Our discussion of a little of Tim’s book focuses on the concept of ‘respiratory modernism’, examining how architecture engaged with the body, air and atmosphere in response to wider social, scientific and political concerns around health and the modern city. How were these ideas communicated to the public? And how does this thinking around breathing, bodies, environment and habitation come to us now, in this age of ultramodernism?
Tim is Tim Altenhof is an architect and senior scientist at the University of Innsbruck. He can be found at work, on his own website and on Instagram. The book is linked above.
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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 
Image credits: Main: Luckenwalde Dye Works © Tim Altenhof (2023), Author photo: © Bengt Stiller. 
#ArchitecturePodcast #BreathingSpaceArchitecture #RespiratoryModernism #ArchitectureAndHealth   #ArchitecturalTheory

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