A is for Architecture Podcast

Ambrose Gillick
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Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with industry experts, scholars and practitioners, the podcast unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers marvelous insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. This podcast is not affiliated in the slightest with Ambrose's place of works. All opinions expressed by him are his alone, obvs.

  1. Lee Ivett: Blueprint for a new architecture.

    1 DAY AGO

    Lee Ivett: Blueprint for a new architecture.

    In the 193rd episode of this here A is for Architecture Podcast, Lee Ivett joined me for a second time, 1591 days since his last appearance here. Now a Professor and Head of the London School of Architecture, and still an active architect, I wanted to speak to Lee to discuss architectural education and practice life. As architecture’s professional bodies push for recognition and reform, whilst governments – or their financial backers – who knows - seemingly push back, it appears like the profession is at an inflection point. Lee argues for a radical shift in how we train the next generation and, with style, describes the urgent need for a more responsive, integrated education. Stuck in a world of materials, flows, logistics, finance, risk and policy, architecture is a cumbersome beast. But, I think Lee would suggest, it’s also too important to abandon in favour of neoliberal indifference and a ‘trust the market’ fundamentalism if we are to retain or remake good urban space. Instead, in a world of rapid change and technological shocks, architecture has to move beyond both aesthetics-first or tech-fix positions and towards critical inquiry and research-led architecture that tries to make the world better. Lee can be found at work here, and on Instagram as Baxendale here. Other People’s Dreams can be found here. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  Image credits: Main: Ecaterina Stefanescu. Second: Jack Bolton. Third: Lucy Strange/ LSA.

    1 hr
  2. Itohan Osayimwese: Africa, ornament and architecture.

    5 MAR

    Itohan Osayimwese: Africa, ornament and architecture.

    In Episode 192 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Itohan Osayimwese, Professor of the History of Art & Architecture and Urban Studies and Department Chair at Brown University, discusses small parts of her big book, Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage, published with Princeton University Press in October last year. In our conversation, Itohan argues that during the age of European empire, colonizers not only expropriated African art and artifacts but systematically – strategically - dismembered buildings, removing them piece-by-piece. In doing so, structural and ornamental components became, in the alienating setting of European and North American museums, reduced to craft artefacts, denuded of weight and depth of cultural knowledge and meaning. This fragmentation, Itohan argues, has contributed to scholarly and popular silences about African architectural histories, erasing built environments as sites of cultural expression, social life and technological innovation. The book reframes these displaced elements as architecture proper, challenging stereotypes that reduce African building traditions to tasteful ethnographic curiosities, arguing instead that they might be better seen as potential tools for restitution and repair. Itohan can be found at work here. The book is linked above. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  Image credits: Main: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; Book cover: ©Martin Franken #AfricanArchitecture #ColonialLoot #CulturalHeritage #RestitutionAfrica #DecolonizingArchitecture

    1h 11m
  3. Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius: Scandinavia and the architecture of welfare.

    26 FEB

    Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius: Scandinavia and the architecture of welfare.

    The A is for Architecture Podcast’s 191st episode is a conversation with two professors, Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius, about their and Guttorm Ruud’s publication, Architecture and Welfare: Scandinavian Perspectives, which came out with Birkhäuser in 2025. To summarise the book is hard, composed as it is of twenty essays by different authors exploring aspects of postwar Scandinavian architecture and the role it played in materialising welfare state ideals, giving spatial form to principles of equality, collectivism and democracy. Today, as the political consensus around universal welfare has been weakened from within and without, the book asks us to think again of that peculiar and in some ways utopian architectural legacy, examining its contested past and uncertain future, and positioning it as a subject not just for historians, but as a model that still challenges and instructs. Ellen is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Copenhagen and is there and on LinkedIn; Thordis is professor of architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The book is linked above. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  #ArchitecturePodcast #WelfareArchitecture #ScandinavianArchitecture #PostwarArchitecture #WelfareState

    58 min
  4. Alexander Josephson: Practice life and the political.

    19 FEB

    Alexander Josephson: Practice life and the political.

    For Episode 190 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Alexander Josephson, architect, lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, and in 2012, co-founder of PARTISANS, a Toronto-based collective of architects, designers and thinkers that, among other things, is currently collaborating on the renewal of the Hearn Generating Station, a massive decommissioned power plant on Toronto’s waterfront, projected to hold the largest gallery space in North America as part of its transformation into 'a city in a building'. The practice’s works are regularly featured in global design publications. Alex also founded Cumulus, a tech start-up that provides ‘an immersive digital archive of photos, videos and files in a memory cloud that clients can share with loved ones’, a sort-of archive of the virtual, a digital ossuary, if you will. For an architect, this is the ultimate Latourian-turn, I guess.  Alex can be found on PARTISANS’ website, on LinkedIn and Instagram. Cumulus is here. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  #ArchitecturePodcast # #AlexJosephson #PARTISANSarchitecture #InnovativeArchitecture #TorontoArchitect

    56 min
  5. Frances Northrop and Amica Dall: Commons and cooperative practice.

    12 FEB

    Frances Northrop and Amica Dall: Commons and cooperative practice.

    For this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Amica Dall, co-founder of Assemble, writer and researcher, and Frances Northrop, head of community economic power at the New Economics Foundation and a director of Totnes Community Development Society discuss Common Treasures (Vol. 1 & 2), published by Little Toller Books in 2025. Common Treasures was founded in 2025 by members & collaborators of Assemble to explore challenges in rural communities through practical, grassroots responses. Its aim is to enable rural communities, landowners, housing providers, and local authorities to achieve better shared outcomes for the people living and working there, and the land they live on. The books documents emerging conversations exploring alternative approaches to rural housing, land, food systems, and livelihoods. It’s spatial, programmatic, projective, social and organisational, and as such it’s designerly. So we talk about some of that. Socially, Amica can be gotten on LinkedIn and via Assemble. Frances is more distributed, electronically, and can be found on the NEF site, on LinkedIn and Instagram.  + Music credit: ⁠Bruno Gillick Image credit: ⁠Kaye Song⁠ #ArchitecturePodcast #RuralFutures #AlternativeRuralHousing #CommonTreasuresBook #CommunityLedDesign

    51 min
  6. Nele De Raedt & Maarten Delbeke: Beauty, aesthetics.

    6 FEB

    Nele De Raedt & Maarten Delbeke: Beauty, aesthetics.

    For Episode 188 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Nele De Raedt and Maarten Delbeke discuss some small parts of the 2025 book, Beauty in Architecture: Perspectives from Theory and Practice, which they edited and published with Bloomsbury.  Beauty in Architecture connects ideas from across practice and theory that consider how beauty might again become central to architectural discourse. Beauty has re-emerged in public debate, but sadly it remains contested in critical discussions, often treated with suspicion – as an issue of politics, more or less. But, as we discuss, perhaps by taking beauty seriously, architecture might permit of – and articulate - broader reflections on values, identity, class, ecology and the notion of a shared cultural life. Nele is Associate Professor in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and is on LinkedIn and can be found on Instagram at her research group super_positions. Maarten is Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and is on Instagram. The book is linked above. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick Photograph credit: Hong Wan Chan

    56 min
  7. Fernando Lara: Alternative American architectures.

    29 JAN

    Fernando Lara: Alternative American architectures.

    In Episode 187 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Fernando Lara, professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, discusses his book, Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2024. Spatial Theories for the Americas critiques the dominance of Eurocentric, cartesian and elitist frameworks in architectural and urban studies, imposed through the colonial-modernist project, particularly as they impinge upon the articulation of indigenous practices, spatial knowledges and cultural forms. Fernando argues that these perspectives failed to reflect the unique realities of the American built world as it was when first encountered by Europeans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the legacy of which persists to this day. To address this, the book proposes new theories from multiple disciplines forming a fresh - self-determined – Amerindian vision.  Fernando can be found at work here, on his personal website here, on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above. + Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  #ArchitecturePodcast #SpatialTheoriesAmericas #FernandoLuizLara #DecolonialArchitecture #ArchitectureTheory #CriticalUrbanism #BuiltEnvironmentStudies #EurocentrismCritique #IndigenousSpatialKnowledge #ArchitectureAndColonialism

    53 min
  8. Francis Terry: New classical architecture.

    22 JAN

    Francis Terry: New classical architecture.

    In Episode 186 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, neoclassical architect Francis Terry, founder of Francis Terry and Associates, discusses his upbringing, education, drawing, work, practice and the imposed politics of it all. In our binary times, it seems strange to think of traditional classical design -still so popular among the public - as somehow controversial, and yet here we are. The institutional profession certainly preferences contemporary modernism – look at all the prize winner – but perhaps this is hardly surprising given widespread disinterest in- and lack of practical knowledge of – the techniques and patterns of traditional design in architectural education. Classicism is of course tainted by its association to a certain politics; modernism by contrast remains rhetorically linked to emancipatory social movements.  Even so, whilst classicism retains its hold on the public imagination as rooted, reassuring and legible, architects like Francis - versed in the Doric and the Tuscan, in fluted shafts, acanthus leaves and egg and dart, in astragal, dentils and domes - remain very busy.  Francis Terry and Associates is here, and one of his books, Francis Terry: A Life in Sketchbooks, is linked here. Francis is on Insta and LinkedIn. + #ArchitecturePodcast #FrancisTerry #ClassicalArchitecture #NeoclassicalArchitecture #ArchitecturePodcast #ArchitecturalDrawing #TraditionalArchitecture #ArchitectureAndPolitics #ContemporaryArchitectureDebate #ArchitecturalPractice

    54 min
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5
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About

Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with industry experts, scholars and practitioners, the podcast unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers marvelous insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. This podcast is not affiliated in the slightest with Ambrose's place of works. All opinions expressed by him are his alone, obvs.

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