With warfare seemingly creeping up on us – because governments keep starting them – it seemed like a good idea to speak to Ed Wall, Professor of Cities and Landscapes at the University of Greenwich, about his book Architecture for Warfare: How Corporations Profit from Destruction and Reconstruction, published by Jovis in December last year.

It’s difficult to know what to say about this, beyond what Professor Wall describes in the book: there is a seam of architectural practice which makes the infrastructure of war and reconstruction, and makes a good deal of good business whilst doing it. Isn’t it better, one might ask, that architects, with their designerly imaginations, their theories and lovely drafting skills, and their spatial-technical and ecological competencies, are involved in this sort of stuff? At least then it’ll have passive ventilation.

Jeremy Bentham – not an architect – drew the panopticon in the Eighteenth Century and in so doing arguably more-or-less defined the modernist city. The great Alfred - Waterhouse designed Strangeways in the 19th, and that’s pretty lit. Then there was Speer, of course, in the Twentieth. So the connection isn’t new. It still feels odd, though, as Ed explains…

Ed can be found at work, on Instagram and LinkedIn. The book is linked above.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

#ArchitectureForWarfare #DesignEthics #UrbanReconstruction

In Episode 194 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, architect and writer and Andreas Lechner, Associate Professor of Design and Building Theory at TU Graz in Austria and founder of Studio Andreas Lechner, also based in Graz. We connected off the back of my previous conversation with Hans van der Heijden – with whom he had spoken on Drawing Matters last summer.

Specifically, Andreas and I spoke about his book, Thinking Design: Blueprint for an Architecture of Typology (Park Books 2021), a book which combines theoretical reflection on architectural teaching with an illustrated visual atlas of 144 projects – all drawn orthographically and with no photographs – which serves as invitation to explore architectural design through the lens of typology – somewhat maligned in an age of humanised fun, grandiosity, pomp and intellectual frilliness - arguing as I read it for something a bit more normal - the primacy of form as the core of the discipline.

Andreas’s practice can be found here, and he is on LinkedIn and Instagram. His conversation with the super Hans on Drawing Matters is here. The book is linked above.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Image credits: 1: © Andreas Lechner, 2: © Andreas Lechner, Park Books, 3 © TU Graz.

#ArchitecturalTypology #ThinkingDesign #ArchitecturePodcast #BuildingTypology #AndreasLechner

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.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Image credits: Main: Ecaterina Stefanescu. Second: Jack Bolton. Third: Lucy Strange/ LSA.