A is for Architecture Podcast

For Immanuel Kant, an aesthetic experience required four conditions: disinterestedness, universality, purposiveness and necessity. Architecture, as such, has always struggled with this, because its appreciation is fundamentally tied to a sense of its utility – as shelter, symbol, status, want – and its designedness evidence of its adherent beauty relative to its purpose.
Artist made architecture of the sort documented in scholar, author, folklorist and former director and curator of SPACES, Jo Farb Hernadez’s Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, and published by Tra Publishing in April this year, might square the circle. Here we have an extraordinary range of places and spaces that we can approach aesthetically in very Kantian ways. But what are these strange, discrepant heterotopias doing, what brings them about, who are they for and what place do the have in the world of architecture proper?
Jo can be found on her website, with links there to her other online appearances. 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: Jo Farb Hernadez - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.

What if buildings could free themselves – or be freed by their architects – of the stricture of type, of discrete identity, of typology? What might happen if, for example, a school and a house - schoolness and houseness – were hybridized? What if building and non-building, even, were wedded? Might this, perhaps, offer a way to negotiate, heal even, the nature-architecture divide?
This is not pompous and pretentious speculation, but the proposal of Winka Dubbeldam, founder-director of Archi-Tectonics and director and CEO of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), in her recent edited book, Monsters and Mutants:  Explorations in the Architecture-Nature Continuum, published by Park Books in 2025, and featuring essays by Winka, Justin Korhammer, Thom Mayne, Carlo Ratti and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen. It is also the modus operandi of her and Justin Korhammer’s New York, Los Angles and Hangzhou practice, Archi-Tectonics. 
Winka and I talk all this, and intriguing and inspiring it is. For new conditions, we probably need new typologies and a taxonomy agile enough to meet a swiftly tilting planet. 
Here is Winka at work and university. 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: Hybrid Stadium & Concert Hall, by SFAP.

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.