A is for Architecture Podcast

It’s Christmas, and just past Hanukkah, and in recognition of that, Episode 183 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, is a conversation with architect, photographer and writer Gili Merin, about her extraordinary and exquisite book, Analogous Jerusalem, which came out with Humboldt Books earlier this year.  In Analogous Jerusalem, Gili explores how the sacred topography of the Jerusalem of the pilgrim—particularly the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross —has been analogically recreated across Europe. Combining essays and a photographic travelogue Gili argues that these "analogous" Jerusalems often surpass the original in their materialisation because, freed from the geopolitical conflicts and material constraints of the "real" city, they permit of a spiritual purity that connects the pilgrims more deeply to the Jerusalem of their imaginations, the Jerusalem that should be. We discuss a little of this, and how Christianity displaced Jerusalem's holiness to distant landscapes, creating sites that foster devotion, introspection, and community. Indeed perhaps, through the words and the abundant, beautiful images of shrines, routes and holy places of the way Jerusalem’s holiness has been reconfigured elsewhere - everywhere - the book itself is an invitation to readers to embark on their own "virtual pilgrimage" without leaving home.Gili currently holds a post-doc position at TU Wien and is a senior researcher at the Geneva University of Art and Design or HEAD. She can be found on her website, on Instagram and LinkedIn. She’s been and done quite a lot in her short years, so with a quick google will find you a lot of stuff.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick Image credits: Main – Gili Merin, Book cover - Francesco Spallacci

In the 182nd episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, Andreea Mihalache joined me to discuss her new book, Boredom and the Architectural Imagination: Rudofsky, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steinberg, which she published with the University of Virginia Press in 2024.  Exploring the boundaries of boredom, Andreea and I discuss Bernard Rudofsky, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and Saul Steinberg, the four thinker-makers of the twentieth century explored in her excellent book, whose writing and design challenged boredom’s pervasive, creeping grip on the modern imagination. Looking at our orderly, crisp and glassy, financialised cities now, it’s perhaps difficult to see how their critique of modernity and the city changed anything. But by proposing modes of operation to counter it, each of these folk gave us ways of thinking, engaging and acting through design which remain elegant, generative and – I think – rather inspiring.  Andreea is Co-Director of the Architecture Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Architecture at Clemson University, USA. The book is linked above. +Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick  #ArchitecturePodcast #ArchitecturalTheory #BoredomInArchitecture #LessIsABore #RobertVenturi #DeniseScottBrown #BernardRudofsky #SaulSteinberg #ArchitectureBooks #ArchTheoryPodcast

For Episode 181 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I was joined by the Berlin-based artist, Larissa Fassler whose work explores through imagery and sculpture - aesthetic, layered, ambiguous maps, models and interventions - the social and political spatialites of cities and their everyday encounter by people there. Larissa’s work has intrigued and delighted me for quite a long time, so it was a real prize to finally get to meander with her through a very little of her thinking, experiences, background and motivations.As I understand it, Larissa’s work derives from deep engagement in places, documenting them through a host of means and rendering them as something like palimpsests, which in turn demand close and slow encounter by their public, producing a sort-of double coded knowledge of cities and the people who live with them, pointing thus towards space’s meaning and possibilities. It’s all very architectural, or at least, I think, towards that which we in architectural education might in our better moments aspire.Larissa can be found on her website, on Instagram and via Galerie POGGI, with whom she works. Viewshed, a very good book on her work, can be found at Distanz, its publishers, as can the catalogue for Building Worlds here. There are good articles on Larissa’s work in many places.  +Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #LarissaFassler #UrbanMapping #ArchitecturePodcast #Psychogeography #ContemporaryArtAndArchitecture #SocialSpace #CityAsPalimpsest #SpatialPolitics #ArtAndUrbanism #BerlinArtScene

For Episode 180 of the A is for Architecture Podcast, the extraordinary Australian architect, Peter Stutchbury, joined me to speak about a little of his work, his origins, his purpose and his ethic. It’s an extraordinary story, beautifully told by a wonderful man, a worthy addition for this, a jubilee episode. Peter’s work is deeply rooted in the land and culture of his homeland, and all the complexity that implies. There are histories, cosmologies, manners and methods, which are drawn together in places and through this, in Peter’s telling, ‘the work becomes a means of connection, so that as you find the work, you also find yourself becoming of the work, not in a way that you copy it […] or that necessarily makes sense to you, but in a way that allows you to relax and perhaps even not be judgemental, perhaps even to take it with you, as part of your entourage.’That’s quite a way of putting it.Peter Stutchbury Architecture can be found here, are on Instagram and  more or less everywhere that’s anywhere architectural online. The wonderful book by Ewan McEoin and published by Thames and Hudson in 2016, is Under the Edge: The Architecture of Peter Stutchbury. +Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick #PeterStutchbury #AustralianArchitecture #ArchitecturePodcast #SustainableDesign #ArchitectureAndLandscape #PlaceBasedDesign #ArchitecturalEthics #ContemporaryArchitecture #ArchitectureInAustralia #AIsForArchitecture

Episode 179 of the A is for Architecture Podcast is a fascinating, expansive discussion with scholar, planner and architect, Dr Shiben Banerji, associate professor in the Department of the History of Art at UC Berkley, about some small parts of his sprawling and wonderful Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, which he published with the University of Texas Press in July this year.In the shadow of empire-collapsing wars and revolutions, Shiben explains, occult modernists of the early-twentieth-century saw not just chaos, but a rare chance to forge a spiritually united humanity. Across the world, from Argentina to India to America, occultist architects and planners dreamed up radical cities, suburbs and communes designed to awaken a new global subject who would feel bound to all humankind, transcending the impulse for wretched violence. Shiben and I talk all this, and how these new world builders tried to use architecture to engineer souls. Visionary? Indeed. But vision is scary! Listen to Shiben and just relax.Shiben can be found at work and nowhere else, which is very wise. The book is linked above.+Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick