A is for Architecture Podcast

Ambrose Gillick
  • 4.5 (10)
  • Design
  • Weekly

Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with designers, scholars and practitioners, Ambrose unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers the best insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. To keep it free and good, subscribe to the podcast on Patreon. The podcast is not affiliated with Ambrose's place of works.

  1. 1d ago

    Beth Hughes: Education for another architecture.

    In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast Beth Hughes, Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, spoke with me about, well, all sorts – but mainly how architecture is taught now, what sort of thinkers and doers this produces, and therefore what sort of urbanism and architecture we can expect to get from them.  The financial and social barriers built into how architects are trained shapes who designs cities and buildings, which changes the shape of the places we end up living in. To this end, Beth and I discuss Britain’s Architects Registration Board’s proposals to widen access to the profession by reforming the way architects are trained, with many schools now promoting a shorter and less architecturish route to qualification. Others, like the Royal College of Art, are maintaining the existing postgraduate model –a two-year programme.  It’s an interesting moment, one which see the marketization of higher education marry with student anxieties and concerns about costs and employability, to deliver into an ever-more pressured professional context more deployable graduates from a more representative cross-section of society. Ultimately, we speak about Beth’s vision – I guess – of what a future mode of practice built by her graduates might look like.  Beth can be found at work and on LinkedIn.  + Image: RCA students Work In Progress show installation, © RCA Music credits: Bruno Gillick

    Beth Hughes: Education for another architecture.

  2. Oct 20

    Witold Rybczynski: Coming to terms with architecture.

    In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast architectural totem, Canadian American architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with me about his forthcoming book, What Architecture Is, published by Yale University Press on October 27th this year. Rather than the perhaps more expected question – what is architecture? – Witold turns it and us around.  What Architecture Is is composed of seven chapters, riffing on John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps – exploring the value of History, Order, Ornament, Meaning, Beauty, Drawing and Place, but answering too to the critics of his 2013 How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, giving us the readers now the framework to judge buildings, and not just explain them. Grappling again with these, perhaps, architecture can find its public and speak to it again, becoming again the home of our collective memory, meaning and experience. Witold tells his story, which is a good one, and we approach the what and why of his propositions, after a manner, sploshing around in his lovely prose. Witold can be found at work and on his own website. The book is linked above.   + Music credits: Bruno Gillick

    Witold Rybczynski: Coming to terms with architecture.

  3. Oct 13

    Cat Rossi and Charles Holland: Design as method and object.

    This episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast features a brace of professors, Cat Rossi and Charles Holland, both of UCA and Charles, Founder director of Charles Holland Architects. We met in the English port town of Dover to discuss Harvest, from the summer to autumn 2025, and Harvest Moon, a round table made from waste harvested within a forty-mile radius of Canterbury, and coproduced since the winter of 2025 with Local Works Studio, in partnership with Steffi Klenz and Stephen Knott of the Crafts Study Centre, Perry Court Farm and Perry Court Farm and Torry Hill Chestnut Fencing. The Harvest projects are framed by the designer-makers’ awareness of climate and organised around a recurring question — what do we gather, harvest, and give thanks for today? It proposes, after a manner, reconnection through design with growing, seasonality and the harvesting of materials, and the cultures, behaviours and rituals that may descend from them.  Much is said about processes and programming of space as prerequisites for sustaining interventions – it’s not enough to just make a thing without consideration of the activities it sits within and produces. A table needs a meal, needs a crowd, needs grace, needs a drink. The table then is a curatorial format, as Cat puts it. From this particular, can we postulate a universal? Should we? Cat can be found at work, on LinkedIn and Instagram; Charles can be found at work here and here, and on LinkedIn and Instagram. Harvest is linked above. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick

    Cat Rossi and Charles Holland: Design as method and object.

  4. Oct 2

    Antony Wood: Tall buildings and sustainable vertical urbanism.

    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

    Antony Wood: Tall buildings and sustainable vertical urbanism.

  5. Sep 26

    Mabel O. Wilson: Spaces of liberation.

    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.

    Mabel O. Wilson: Spaces of liberation.

  6. Sep 18

    JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.

    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

    JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.

  7. Sep 12

    Shumi Bose: Words relating to theory.

    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

    Shumi Bose: Words relating to theory.

  8. Sep 5

    Maximillian Sternberg: Hans Dollgast: Designing in history

    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

    Maximillian Sternberg: Hans Dollgast: Designing in history
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4.5
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About

Explore the world of architecture with the A is for Architecture Podcast hosted by Ambrose Gillick. Through conversations with designers, scholars and practitioners, Ambrose unpacks the creative and theoretical dimensions of architecture. Whether you're a professional, student, or design enthusiast, the A is for Architecture Podcast offers the best insights into how buildings shape society and society shapes buildings. To keep it free and good, subscribe to the podcast on Patreon. The podcast is not affiliated with Ambrose's place of works.

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