A is for Architecture Podcast

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Antony Wood PhD, Tall Building Expert, Professor of Sustainable Vertical Urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council of Vertical Urbanism, discusses… very tall buildings.
The Council of Vertical Urbanism is the body that oversees the certification of the world’s tallest buildings. Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl, to banality to sustainability, new economics, urban identity and branding and even the housing crisis. Nearly ten times as many Supertalls – buildings over 300m, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years. But outside their appeal as objects – big isn’t always beautiful, but it is normally very impressive – what are they for and how do they work as bits of a city?
Antony discusses this – where ‘tall’ comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they’re made, what sorts of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better. 
Anthony can be found through his excellent and popular LinkedIn page and at work where he runs the Masters of Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism. CVU is linked above. 
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Mabel O. Wilson - architect, historian, and professor at Columbia University, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies - speaks about Thinking from Black: A Lexicon, published by FSG Editions this September. 
Thinking from Black – a product of the Practicing Refusal Collective, a forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century brings together artists, scholars, poets, architects and activists to build a vibrant, experimental vocabulary for black life, culture and collective imagination. 
Through cross-referenced and eclectic entries, the book argues for “thinking from Black” as a creative, plural, and liberatory practice rather than a fixed identity—one that refuses deficit-based frameworks and makes room for contradiction, tension, and possibility. 
Mabel’s work includes books, exhibitions, memorials. You can connect to her via her work, and also LinkedIn and Instagram. The book is linked above. The Practicing Refusal Collective is here.
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credits: Image 1: © J. Meejin Yoon: Detail of Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (2020), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. 
+
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast on Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee.

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, poet and Creative Projects Manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, JL Williams, spoke to me about her recent collection of poetry, Strange Architectures, her fifth book of such with Shearsman Books. In the poems, Jennifer presents visions of architectures dreamed and written, taking us the audience over thresholds and into spaces of her – and perhaps our own – inner worlds. 
The relationships between architecture, the psyche – literally ghost or soul in Greek– and dreamworlds is deep in architecture, manifest I’d argue throughout our modes of imagining and expressing the craft of building design. For Carl Jung, architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche and his dream of a multistorey house helped shape his concept of the collective unconscious. Indeed, the homes he designed gave physical form to his propositions about the relationships between conscious and unconscious life.
In this roomy conversation, Jennifer reads her poems, we discuss them, think about space and buildings, their construction, inner-life, motherhood and Jung and a lot of other stuff. It’s a ride, believe.
Jennifer can be found on her website here, at work here and on LinkedIn.
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick
Image credit: Image 1: © JL Williams
#StrangeArchitectures #ArchitectureAndPoetry #ArchitectureAndPsyche #JungianArchitecture #AisForArchitecturePodcast

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Shumi Bose, about her work as a curator, chief editor of KoozArch, senior lecturer in architecture at Central Saint Martins in London and, I’d suggest, something like an activist-not-activist. Speaking here, Shumi makes a clear case for the role of critical distance as she has found it – and I’d suggest – used it in her various roles and projects. We speak about Shumi’s journey to architectural teaching and thought, her various initiatives in support of diversified knowledges and justice, and the spaces we can make to model integrity in our work.  
Shumi can be found at work here and on LinkedIn and Instagram. 
+
If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast via the Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Shumi online. 
+
Music credits: Bruno Gillick 
Image credit: Image 1: Matthew Blunderfield: Shumi Bose/ Space Popular - Fables for Our Time; Image 2: Special Thanks Studios - Shumi Bose & Space Popular Collaboration; Image 3: Special Thanks Studios: Shumi Bose 
#ArchitecturePodcast # #ShumiBose #ArchitecturalCriticism #ArchitectureAndActivism #CriticalArchitecture

In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Max Sternberg discuss the Bavarian architect Hans Döllgast, the subject of his latest book, Hans Döllgast: Reconstruction and Modernity, which is being published by Lund Humphries in late September this year. Born in 1891 and surviving all Germany’s many troubles to 1974, Döllgast is known chiefly for his postwar reconstruction work in Munich. However, Max argues, in this he has been misread. Rather than an ambivalent light touch ruin architect, his post-war reconstructions in fact grew from a consistent ethos of an anti-dogmatic ‘middle ground’ embracing plurality, revealed in history materialised in accumulated city fabric. As such, his work of retaining the war scars of the Alte Pinakothek, for example, serve as an act of resistance to cultural and political amnesia, to wanting to forget and discard.
Max 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: ©Michael Gaenßler (1980).
#ArchitecturePodcast #HansDollgast #ArchitecturalHistory #PostwarArchitecture #ModernArchitecture