A is for Architecture Podcast

In 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives – Colombia Road Market.

In 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Jean Biaugeaud, showing the hall of the Raspail housing tower by Renée Gailhoustet, 1968.

In 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Wikimedia. Pumpjack east of Andrews, TX (2009) by Zorin09.

In 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. 
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Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Ambrose Gillick.

Frederick 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.