Holly Smith: High-rise housing in Britain.

For this week’s episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Berlin-based writer, architect and activist Anna Kostreva who, with Alex Head, leads Plural Studio, ‘a studio for critical inquiry, publishing and architectural design’. We met to talk about Anna’s novel, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows, which she published in 2023.Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows uses architecture – and an architect narrator - as a way to explore the growing digitisation of everyday urban and spatial life. We talk about this, about the book’s imperative but also about writing, [science] fiction and drawing as a routes to a sort-of triangulated and more shrewd understanding of the world around us.Seeing Fire is linked above. Anna can be found at Plural Studio here, on Instagram here and on LinkedIn here.Have a listen: see things differently.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In Episode 167 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Holly Smith, historian and Research Fellow at/ in St John’s College, University of Cambridge, discuss bits of her forthcoming book, Up in the Air: A History of High Rise Britain, which is out with Verso towards the end of October this year.In Up in the Air, Holly charts the story of Britain’s multistorey council housing—from the post-war construction of estates like Sheffield’s Park Hill to the modern battles to defend them. In the face of the much-publicised failures of high-rise housing to produce the utopian social logics that underpinned them - and punctuated by disaster and explicit tragedy, as at Grenfell - that defence has seemed largely a forlorn one. But were Britain’s high-rise estates really architectural failures? Or were they rather sites where welfare-state ideals were built, contested, and reimagined, as enduring battlegrounds for housing justice?Holly can be found at work here, on Instagram and X. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick Image credit: © Bishopsgate Archive/Tower Blocks UK

In this new episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes spoke with me about her recent book, A Moratorium on New Construction, published by Sternberg Press in 2025 as part of their Critical Spatial Practices series.If a book starts with, ‘To build is to destroy’, things are liable to get pretty exciting (for an architecture fan).  As the bumf puts it – and our chat opens out  - Charlotte’s provocation for a moratorium is in pursuit of a reimagined productive building culture: ‘To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative.’Sound good? Yes. It does.Charlotte has a personal website, as well as space at EPFL. She’s on Instagram too.  +Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In this week’s release of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Wayne Hemingway MBE logged on to discuss one of his latest initiatives, The Housing Assembly, a growing movement seek paths out of the housing crisis by amplifying the voices of folk excluded from secure, affordable homes. Aiming to transform lived experiences into influential action and through grassroots initiatives The Housing Assembly is building from the bottom up a collective platform to demand well-built, affordable homes in good places.For those who don’t know, Wayne is a renowned British designer, co-founder with his wife Gerardine Hemingway of the iconic fashion label Red or Dead which delivered affordable, socially conscious design in the 1980s and 1990s. Wayne and Gerardine later establishing HemingwayDesign, a multi-disciplinary design team dedicated to creating positive social impact through culture-led regeneration, urban design, placemaking, branding, and community collaboration. In short Wayne is something like a national treasure, but edgier and more purposeful. An icon of mine since I first encountered his work – and bought a pair of Red or Dead shoes to go on a date - this was a genuine privilege to record. HemingwayDesign can be found here and on Instagram, The Housing Assembly is linked above and is on Instagram and all over SM. Wayne can be found on LinkedIn.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to the architect, historian and theorist Dr Marianna Charitonidou about her fairly recent book, Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices: Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century, which she published with Routledge in 2023. In the book, Marianna explores how evolving modes of architectural representation reflect epistemological shifts in architecture and urbanism in the modern period. Treating them as something like texts, Marianna analyses drawings’ (and their architects’) roles in mediating relationships between architects, observers and the inhabitants of built spaces. Touching on the work of all the biggies – from Corb and Mies to Rem and Zaha, Rossi, Tschumi, Eisenman, Hejduk and even (my fave) Ungers, the book argues that these transformations reveal ruptures in architecture's imagination, and its shift from modernist universality to PoMo multiplicity.   Marianna has her own website, she’s on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

For this summer’s latest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to the writer Michael Euade to discuss his 2023 book, Antoni Gaudi, part of Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. Gaudi has recently been beatified by the Catholic Church, making him one step short of being declared a saint. But for what? Gaudi is unquestionably a monumental figure in the pantheon of named architects, but saintly? That’s a bit different.  Antoni Gaudí, a revered Art Nouveau architect whose visionary designs reshaped Barcelona’s skyline, was a man of what some see as contrasts—devoutly religious, politically conservative, and boldly innovative. Michael and I discuss this in the context of Gaudi’s home in Catalonia and through his large body of work - including the iconic Sagrada Família - which blended Gothic, Baroque, and Orientalist elements with great sensitivity and style. From humble beginnings in Reus through transformations in Barcelona, Gaudi’s life was marked by personal trial and artistic evolution and Michael’s book – and our conversation - opens up the architect in new ways: as political, social, cultural and spiritual figure.   Michael can be found on his personal website here, and the book is on the Reaktion website, linked above.Visca Catalunya lliure! Well, maybe…+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by Piers Gough and Sophie Ryder, both of CZWG. Piers is the original G of CZWG and it is for that we speak, a firm he founded in 1975 with Nick Campbell, Rex Wilkinson and Roger Zogolovich. CZWG turned 50 years old this year, having become known for bold, characterful designs. Their work was at the vanguard of the postmodern movement in the UK, with notable projects in the 1980 and 1990s instrumental in the urban regeneration game in that period, as public taste moved on from a-historical modernism towards a sort-of playful contextualism, not least at London Docklands, where they played their part in redefining the city’s east including China Wharf and The Circle in Bermondsey, and Cascades on the Isle of Dogs, and where four of their buildings have now been listed for their postmodern significance. More recent work has built on this legacy, and the practice continues to deliver large scale urban and urbane projects that look back as they go on. We discuss all this, in a hybrid sort of way: Piers and Sophie bookend the practice. But as we know, difference makes for lovely conversation.CZWG is at work here, on Insta here and LinkedIn here.Tune in, tune up, tune on.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In Episode 161 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Dr Géraldine Borio - Swiss architect and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong - discusses her exquisite, enigmatic and hugely inspiring book, Looking for the Voids: Learning from Asia’s Liminal Urban Spaces as a Foundation to Expand an Architectural Practice, published by Park Books in 2023.Géraldine’s book explores architectural and urban interventions in residual and liminal spaces across Bangkok, Hong Kong and Seoul, emphasizing what she reads and presents as a philosophy of frugality and spatial economy that is productive, hybrid and amorphous, but definable too. We discuss parts of the five key principles presented —Defining the Void, Interlocking Gaps, Expanding Boundaries, Overlapping Functions, and Being Frugal—consider their meaning and speculate a bit on their wider application in other places.Geraldine can be found at work here. She is on LinkedIn and Instagram. The book is linked above and is well worth a look: an artefact in its own right.Happy listening, then happy reading.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In this, the 160th episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by Professor Christian Schmid, geographer, sociologist, urban researcher and until recently Professor of Sociology in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Christian’s scholarship is wide and deep and includes, among many other things, co-authoring the remarkable Switzerland. An Urban Portrait, with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron among others whilst researcher at ETH Studio Basel in 2006. We met thought to speak about the recent publication in translation of his wonderful book Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space which came out in English with Verso in 2023.In our discussion, Christian describes his engagement with Henri Lefebvre, the great theorist of everyday life, starting with his own activism – an urban revolt, no less – as a student in Zurich in the 1980s. From this, as he tells, ‘Lefebvre was really this kind of philosopher and theorist that really matched somehow our own experiences on the streets, in the struggles [and] became, then a starting point for our collective theory building, and [and] collective research.’We go from that through Lefebvre’s concept of urbanization, the production of space and its commodification in modern societies, and the role of the architect in that – either as agent or resistance. We turn in the end to the present and future: where are we now and where should we aim to go.This is a very excellent episode, believe, because Christian is wonderfully funny, grounded, expert and honest.  Pay attention.Christian can be found at ETH Zurich and on a lot of the internet. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

In the this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Emirati architect and co-founder of Holesum Studio, Azza Aboualam discusses her curation of Pressure Cooker, the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates' 2025 contribution to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Pressure Cooker examines the UAE’s evolving relationship with food production, focusing on how architectural interventions that synthesize indigenous and contemporary knowledges can address food security in one of the world’s most arid regions. Azza frames the exhibition as a response to the UAE’s unique environmental, cultural and social challenges, whilst responding to the specific, situated realities of everyday life in the UAE. But, might well you ask, if the spatiality of food is global, should not Pressure Cooker speak beyond borders? Well, spoiler alert, it does. Azza can be found at work here and on LinkedIn here. The exhibition is linked above. +Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick