JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.

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.

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 GillickImage credit: Image 1: © JL Williams#StrangeArchitectures #ArchitectureAndPoetry #ArchitectureAndPsyche #JungianArchitecture #AisForArchitecturePodcast

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 

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 GillickImage credit: ©Michael Gaenßler (1980).#ArchitecturePodcast #HansDollgast #ArchitecturalHistory #PostwarArchitecture #ModernArchitecture

Architecture’s conscience – as building, buildings, materials and practices – is a bolt-on at best, but more often a semantic, sophistic trick. Architecture as a profession talks ethically but it’s very difficult to see where this manifests in real life. This is an agency problem but also a discipline problem – at a profession-level individualism resists collective action to solve broad social problems. At a policy level, any attempt by anybody to suggest architects have some social obligation that impinges on “design” gets shot down. In a May 2026 op-ed for the Journal of Architecture entitled Architecture et Révolution: The Engineered Consent of a Discipline, Ole Bouman, writer, curator, publisher and Professor in the College of Architecture & Urbanism, Tongji University, Shanghai, makes a strong claim: architecture is aligned with delivering the status quo, just as Le Corbusier suggested in it should. Contrary to the general belief that we ask too much of architecture, Bouman suggests perhaps in fact we ask too little.Ole suggests that the polycrisis upon us requires action at the collective level. To illustrate this, he uses the bicycle: no single bicycle fights climate change but "a culture of cycling can,". No project changes anything but the knowledge of the discipline could.Ole’s website is linked here. The essay 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: © Ole Bouman via Instagram.

As architects, the nature of buildings is as drawings. Even when on site, a building is read in terms of its relationship to the documents off its legal production, preeminent among which – after the contract - are the plan and elevation. As such, the buildings of architects are abstractions. To use Hayles and Gannon, 'design is a mode of practice that represents a reality, but is not the reality it represents.'For others - normal people  - perhaps buildings are the sum of their stuff – materials, light, tone, smell, thresholds and transitions - bodily things. In any case, for this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to Maria Fusco, Professor and Chair of Interdisciplinary Writing at the University of Dundee, about her publication, Legend of the Necessary Dreamer, published by Vanguard Editions, which describes her study of the Palacio Pombal, Lisbon, which Maria produced for the Lisbon Architecture Triennial in 2017. We discuss this, her work and practice, and hear Maria read parts of the book too.It is an elegant example of how buildings might be understood both through and as bodies, textures and histories, and through a thing other than drawing.Maria’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, at work, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: ‘In-situ courtesy of Maria Fusco'.

What would a failing city look like? Would one be able to tell if, for example, London or New York were a busted flush? What would be the markers? Social discord, unwalkable streets, cultivated inequality and polarization, declining mental and physical health might seem like some measures to test.Perhaps a better question is what would a growing city look like? This, as I read it, is the question Gabriella Bennett seeks to answer in her book, How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future, which is coming out with Headline Press on the 13 August, and documents both her personal story and her explorations of places – from the Ukraine to Tokyo, from Florida to the Arctic - that have begun to remake themselves fit for us now. Given urbanisation, the central claim Bennett makes in How to Build a City is simple and insistent: the shape of where you live shapes the life you lead. Because cities both generate their crises and accelerate them, the act of rebuilding is the central moral and creative problem of any urban future.Gabriella’s book is linked above; she can be found on her website, Instagram and LinkedIn. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credits: © Gabriella Bennett. Main: Isometric Hospital Building, SimCity 4 style, from Sprite AI.#HowToBuildACity #UrbanFuture #CityPlanning #UrbanDesign #ArchitecturePodcast

As George Berkeley almost almost said, if architecture is built in a city but no one takes its picture, does it make a sound? Photography is intrinsic to architecture, so much so that most of us only know buildings through the images made of them. What the photographer does then is to manifest architecture in the general imagination; arguably, it makes buildings architecture, elevating it beyond context and into objects: known, identifiable and desired. That means the photograph has in itself meaning, which in turn lends photography ethical content. So it’s an important job. It needs to be done well. To do it well requires skill and craft.What though is a good photograph? To answer that, I spoke to architectural photographer Tim Soar, about his work, his philosophy, artistry, ethics and the mastery required of his method. Beginning in social photography, Tim’s is a lovely story of pursuing technical precision and emotional depth to convey architects’ visions and buildings’ social life. Tim can be found on his website, on Instagram and LinkedIn. 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 credits: © Timothy Soar. Main: Gloucester Services by Glenn Howells Architects, 2016, photographed for Architecture Today.# #ArchitecturalPhotography #TimSoar #ArchitecturePhotography #VisualCulture #ArchitecturePodcast

After the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Koolhaasian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality and bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irénée Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, in his recent book, Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, published by Park Books this year,The title image of the totem — an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community's investment in it or that, and not from mere symbolism — seems to me to gather in Irénée’s whole project: architecture as something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning. Isn’t that architecture itself?Irénée is everywhere online, not much by his own hand, except on Insta. 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: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.

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 Hernández'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. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Jo Farb Hernández - The Mindfield Cemetery by William “Billy” Blevins Tripp; edited by AG.