Show Notes
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to scholar, activist, author and feminist totem, Leslie Kern, about Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies, which she published with Verso in 2022. In Leslie and my conversation we speak broadly about her work and approach, some themes from the book, and how resistance is not just necessary, but possible too. in 1964 Ruth Glass, in her introduction to London: Aspects of Change, named the phenomenon: ‘One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes—upper and lower. Shabby, ‘modest mews and cottages—two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. […] Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed […] The invasion has since spread.’ Glass implied that what is presented as urban improvement is in fact a reassertion of class hierarchy in spatial form. In recent years things have moved on, away from what might be seen as an evolutionary process of cultural and economic enrichment , where artists, bohemians, thinkers and web designers find space for their creative praxis. Now the market makes it, and the government spends its taxes to make it more likely to occur. Leslie can be found on her website, linked above, as is the book. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing via links in the podcast description. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Ambrose Gillick.
More from A is for Architecture Podcast
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast architectural totem, Canadian American architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke with me about his forthcoming book, What Architecture Is, published by Yale University Press on October 27th this year. Rather than the perhaps more expected question – what is architecture? – Witold turns it and us around. What Architecture Is is composed of seven chapters, riffing on John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps – exploring the value of History, Order, Ornament, Meaning, Beauty, Drawing and Place, but answering too to the critics of his 2013 How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit, giving us the readers now the framework to judge buildings, and not just explain them. Grappling again with these, perhaps, architecture can find its public and speak to it again, becoming again the home of our collective memory, meaning and experience. Witold tells his story, which is a good one, and we approach the what and why of his propositions, after a manner, sploshing around in his lovely prose. Witold can be found at work and on his own website. The book is linked above. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick
This episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast features a brace of professors, Cat Rossi and Charles Holland, both of UCA and Charles, Founder director of Charles Holland Architects. We met in the English port town of Dover to discuss Harvest, from the summer to autumn 2025, and Harvest Moon, a round table made from waste harvested within a forty-mile radius of Canterbury, and coproduced since the winter of 2025 with Local Works Studio, in partnership with Steffi Klenz and Stephen Knott of the Crafts Study Centre, Perry Court Farm and Perry Court Farm and Torry Hill Chestnut Fencing. The Harvest projects are framed by the designer-makers’ awareness of climate and organised around a recurring question — what do we gather, harvest, and give thanks for today? It proposes, after a manner, reconnection through design with growing, seasonality and the harvesting of materials, and the cultures, behaviours and rituals that may descend from them. Much is said about processes and programming of space as prerequisites for sustaining interventions – it’s not enough to just make a thing without consideration of the activities it sits within and produces. A table needs a meal, needs a crowd, needs grace, needs a drink. The table then is a curatorial format, as Cat puts it. From this particular, can we postulate a universal? Should we? Cat can be found at work, on LinkedIn and Instagram; Charles can be found at work here and here, and on LinkedIn and Instagram. Harvest is linked above. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick
In this episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Professor Antony Wood PhD, Tall Building Expert, Professor of Sustainable Vertical Urbanism at the Illinois Institute of Technology, author, architect and former president and CEO of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, now the Council of Vertical Urbanism, discusses… very tall buildings. The Council of Vertical Urbanism is the body that oversees the certification of the world’s tallest buildings. Tallness, as our cities now attest, is seemingly the predominant solution to almost all urban problems, from sprawl, to banality to sustainability, new economics, urban identity and branding and even the housing crisis. Nearly ten times as many Supertalls – buildings over 300m, have been built since 2000 than were built in the previous 100 years. But outside their appeal as objects – big isn’t always beautiful, but it is normally very impressive – what are they for and how do they work as bits of a city? Antony discusses this – where ‘tall’ comes from, what it achieves as a typology, how they’re made, what sorts of places and cities they make, and how they could do it all a lot better. Anthony can be found through his excellent and popular LinkedIn page and at work where he runs the Masters of Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism. CVU is linked above. + Music credits: Bruno Gillick
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 Gillick Image credit: Image 1: © JL Williams #StrangeArchitectures #ArchitectureAndPoetry #ArchitectureAndPsyche #JungianArchitecture #AisForArchitecturePodcast