Frances Northrop and Amica Dall: Commons and cooperative practice.

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.

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

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 

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

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 GillickImage credit: ⁠Kaye Song⁠#ArchitecturePodcast #RuralFutures #AlternativeRuralHousing #CommonTreasuresBook #CommunityLedDesign

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 GillickPhotograph credit: Hong Wan Chan

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

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

In the latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, recorded at the end of last year, Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat spoke to me about her new book, A Territory in Conflict: Eras of Development and Urban Architecture in Gaza, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.The Gaza Strip was formed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and served to accommodate fleeing refugees. Until 1967 Administered by Egypt, Israel's occupation of the region after the Six Day War saw settlement building and military governance, till in 2005 it withdrew and Hamas took control. But the story of Gaza’s form – it’s spatial and material history - isn’t just one of conflict, but really an interplay of competing forces, ideas and identities. Fatina’s is an extraordinary book, really, and quite other as a piece of history writing, made more pertinent now that so much of the material history of this strange and embattled place needs making again. The book is linked above. Fatina is Assistant Professor and Head of the Spaces-in-Transition Lab at Tel Aviv University. She is on Facebook and Insta.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #ArchitecturePodcast #ArchitecturalHistory #UrbanStudies #SpatialHistory #CriticalUrbanism #ArchitectureAndPolitics #PostcolonialUrbanism #BuiltEnvironmentStudies #MiddleEastArchitecture #ResearchInArchitecture #AIsForArchitecture

For the first episode of 2026 for the A is for Architecture Podcast, we’re starting slow and steady – but rather inspiringly I think - with Patrick Hutchison, a builder. Patrick’s very recent book, Cabin: Into the Woods with a Clueless Craftsman, which he published with Harper Collins in November 2025, tells the story of his journey from copywriter to carpenter and now, bestselling author and carpenter, via the renovation – the discovery, in a manner - of a small cabin in the woods. It’s an elegant story indeed, which beyond a sort-of practical how-to for other itchy-footed office-jockeys, is one tangentially rooted in an American romance and myth – from indigenous peoples, Thoreau, pioneers and non-conformists. Through the cabin and through the book, Patrick describes his journey of discovery, at once a DIY adventure story and a meditation on how to find meaning, community and identity through making, through building and through acts of ordinary creation. Architecture has long been allured by the idea of the homes of our forebears, the original dwelling, the cabin in the woods. The preference, as Gombrich put it, for the primitive. But finding a gap in modernity’s matrix? That’s the dream, isn’t it?Patrick can be found on his personal website, on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above, and has been reviewed everywhere, with Patrick having done quite a bit of TV about it too. Have a wander on the internet and you’ll probably find him.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick