The Arch. Ed. Podcast James Benedict Brown

For almost ten years, second-year Architecture students at the University of Nottingham have been building small educational buildings in South Africa. This year, the Department of Architecture and Built Environment invited me to participate in the 2017/18 edition of the project, building a small crèche in the village of Mothopong, near Tzaneen in Limpopo Province for the Thušanang Trust. The Trust is a non-profit founded in 1986 to train teachers and establish community-based Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres.

For almost ten years, second-year Architecture students at the University of Nottingham have been building small educational buildings in South Africa. This is the second in a series of podcasts to be recorded while I was participating in the project as a guest academic staff member. In this episode, recorded in South Africa during week three of the four-week build (and week one of phase two) I speak once again to structural engineers Lois Plaistow and Steve Wickham of Price & Myers; project manager Pete Russell, Thušanang Trust Director Terry Morgan and University of Nottingham Faculty of Engineering Project Officer Tony Gospel. 

This is the first in a series of podcasts to be recorded during the University of Nottingham's 2017/18 live project in South Africa. This year's crêche was designed by a group of three second-year students in the second year of Nottingham's ARB/RIBA Part 1 Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) programme. It will be built by approximately thirty students in two consecutive two-week phases over the four weeks of the 2018 Easter vacation. I'm in South Africa for phase two.

The 2017 AAE conference (see episode 26) presented the opportunity to sit down with Bryan Bell, Founder and Executive Director of Design Corps and Associate Professor of Architecture at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. We spoke about his experiences of architectural education and practice, from studying under Peggy Guggenheim to meeting and working with Sam Mockbee. After grad school, he worked for a brief period in the office of Steven Holl before realising his calling lay elsewhere.

In the second of two episodes from the Czech Republic, this podcast features an interview with Regina Loukotová, Rector of ARCHIP (the Architecture Institute in Prague). Founded in 2010 and enrolling its first students in 2011, ARCHIP is a private school of architecture in Prague, offering undergraduate and graduate programmes in English. Founded by Loukotová and her late husband Martin Roubík (1949–2008), ARCHIP was established to change the way in which architecture was taught and discussed in the Czech Republic.

Dr Henri Achten is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture at Czech Technical University (České vysoké učení technické v Praze, CVUT), Prague, and Director of MoLab, the Faculty's Experimental Design Studio, researching parametric & performative design thinking, contemporary design theory, and rapid prototyping in the design process, as well as offering design studio units with a focus in these areas to students.