ArchitectureTalk: Recent Episodes
Vikram Prakash
Designed around an engaging conversation, Architecture Talk explores issues in contemporary architecture and architectural thinking. It is hosted by Vikram Prakash, Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Today, we are joined by Manu Sobti who is a senior lecturer at the University of Brisbane in Australia. We talk to Sobti today about his research on Pierre Jeanneret and Aditya Prakash, what he found, and the role of these two people in the making of modern India and modern architecture
Today, we are joined by Ijlal Muzzafar who is a professor at RISD and author of Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital. The book is M’s thesis on how modernists in the post-war era invoked and worked with the concept of development to produce a re-imaging of development as a process of self-actualization without real sizeable investment of capital.
Today, we are joined by Jeffrey Fracé who is the chair of acting at the University of Washington. Fracé discusses his background of the arts through Shakespeare, improvisational theater, the different modalities of theater, and the difference between producing theater and producing architecture.
“Architecture and culture operate in a porous manner through the construction of ideas…Trotsky reading Henry George, who had an impact on Frank Lloyd Wright in the U.S. which then bounced back into Russia in the 1930s… so I’m interested in the worldwide circulation of ideas, and their patterns and themes of discourse. ” Jean Louis Cohen
We are bringing back our conversation with Jean Louis Cohen, who led an international and multi-placed life deeply interested in the mutation transformation movement, ricochet reflection of architectural ideas of modernism globally. Discussing his work on the transurban, Jean Louis Cohen takes us on a tour of the history of ideas that have shaped, formed, and deformed the various cities that stitch together the seams of the world. This conversation continues the ongoing conversation centering the impact of Modernism on architecture and contemporary culture in the world today.
At age 90, Balkrishna Vithaldas (B.V.) Doshi's journey in architecture has spanned 70 years, starting from Indian independence in 1947, to the vicissitudes of postmodernism and globalization. Doshi's voice is a touchstone in global and Indian modernism. Conversation topics include his reflection on life and creativity, his 'favorite' projects, the legacy of Nehruvian modernization, and architectural pedagogy in India today.
As we kick off our new season on ArchitectureTalk, we are bringing back our conversation with Anthony Vidler: Modernism, Utopia, and Living the Catastrophe. Anthony Vidler (1941-October 19, 2023) was an architectural historian, role model, and friend who will be missed dearly.
Today we are joined by Gregg Colburn who co-wrote “Homelessness is a Housing Problem”. Colburn also shares with us his findings about causes of homelessness, his views on the situation, and some solutions that could remove the problem.
Today we are joined by SB Divya who wrote the science fiction novel Meru and helps us think about potential futures on Earth. Meru as we discuss in this episode is a future in which tech is developed based on imaginations of current technology and science and possibilities unknown but conceivable.
Today we are joined by Martein de Vletter who is the associate director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and gathers archival material dedicated to rethinking, remembering, and preserving architectural thoughts and memories. Vletter also talks about decolonizing the archive and transforming it into something more diverse, inclusive, and multifaceted.
Today we are joined by Sumangala Damodaran who teaches in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, trained economist, dedicated her life to documenting and being a part of leftist oppositional protest movements. Today, Damodaran discusses her protest songs, her songs of sorrow, her singing, the research she has done to connect civilizations, and the diverse impact she has created internationally.
Today we are joined by Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Desjardins who talk about building alternative technologies that respond to and critique the world of data, and their project “Soft Data and Common Wares”.
Today we are joined by Eliyahu Keller who shares with us the relationship between war, war technology, architectural thinking, the climate crisis, the post-COVID era, and the crisis of imagination.
To kick off the new year, today we are joined by Neelkanth Chhaya who is a professor in India. Chhaya discusses forms and contingence of south Asian aesthetic theory, he is an open-minded and inquisitor thinker, and examines the ideas and interests and cross-references them.
This week, we are joined by Jan Schmidt-Garre, who directed the film The Promise. Architect B.V. Doshi which was shown at the ADFF (Architecture Design Film Festival). This film took place in the last few years of his life and highlighted his philosophies and outlook on architecture and design.
Today we are joined with Ayad Rahmani who teaches architecture at Washington State University. Rahmani's love for literature and architecture leads us to today's conversation about Moby Dick and architecture.
As we kick off our new season on ArchitectureTalk, we are bringing back our conversation with Anthony Vidler: Modernism, Utopia, and Living Catastrophe. Anthony Vidler (1941-October 19, 2023) was an architectural historian, role model, and friend who will be missed dearly.
This week we are joined by Mindy Seu who published The Cyberfeminism Index electronically and physically. What we focus on is how the index is gathered, organized, and shared and how it could be applicable in the built environment.
This week we are joined by Phillip Thurtle, who is the director of the Comparitive History of Ideas (CHID) program at the University of Washington Seattle. Thurtle talks to us about the gothic, what it is and what it means to him and what he researches.
This week, we are joined by the founder and CEO of Phantom Hands Deepak Srinath. Phantom Hands creates chairs and other various furniture pieces, and also brings attention to Indian craft worldwide.
This week, we are joined again with Mariam Issoufou Kamara and AbdouMaliq Simone, where we talk about the “Faada” and “Adda” as hangout spaces, and go in depth of what future Faada and Adda spaces would look like with urban inhabitation.
This week, we are joined again with Benedikt Hartl. Hartl and his girlfriend recently biked from Seattle to La Jolla, and shares his experience as a European traveling through the West Coast as well as the architectural impacts he observed.
This week, we are joined by James Graham who is currently an assistant professor at CCA, and used to be faculty at Columbia University and handled publications there. His work heavily revolves around the planetary and climate crisis.
This week, we are joined by Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, who are both principals at AGENCY. Kripa and Mueller recently published their book Fronts: Military Urbanism and the Developing World, which starts our conversation and dives into immigration, migration, and questions the climate change emergency.
This week, we are joined by Clara Kraft Isono, who directed the architecture film Bawa's Garden. Isono is an architect, film maker, and educator in the UK and is currently focused on film making. In this discussion, Isono talks about what film making is, as well as what an architecture film is and what it should be.
This week, we are joined by Professor Jeremy Till, who talks about his work with the research collective MOULD and their project Architecture after Architecture which interrogates the constitutive entanglement between architecture and modernism. With modernism responsible for the climate emergency, we will have to re-think what architecture is in fundamental terms, and Till discusses architecture as the solution.
This week we are once again joined by Mariam Issoufou Kamara for the Faada-Adda Conversations Part II: Future Hériter. In this conversation, Kamara talks about breaking free from the boundaries of the cardinal directions and getting into new ways of being.
This week we are joined by Kyle Bergman, who is the CEO of the Architecture and Design Film Festival. Bergman shares with us his thoughts about the connections between film, architecture, and design, and more.
This week we are joined by Junichi Satoh, who is current faculty in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. Junichi shares with us how he has incorporated architectural thinking in diverse and constructive ways throughout his life, and how it has gotten him to where he is today.
This week, we are joined again by Mark Jarzombek to discuss the data society on contemporary architecture, as well as his book Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age.
This week, we had the opportunity to talk to Aaron Bourget who is a film maker of hundreds of short films. Bourget's process of creativity? Pre-crastination, use whatever you have at hand, and push whatever you have into the world week by week.
This week, Nigerian architect Mariam Kamara joins us in a stimulating discussion about reimagining architecture and epistemologies that come from West Africa. Kamara also touches on how African, South Asian, and other non-European can help us think out of modernity.
This week, we are joined once again with Ambrose Gillick for Part II of Comparting Connections in the Ethosphere. In this episode, Gillick shares his thoughts on the connections of his two interests in sacred architecture and the modalities and politics of design and the city influence that connects to architecture trends.
Kicking off our new season of ArchitectureTalk, we engage in a conversation with Ambrose Gillick. Gillick shares his interest and findings in participatory and community-led architecture through a collaborative project with self-organising women's- co-op in Dakar, Senegal, and theory of sacred space in medieval church architecture.
We're back with a conversation with Principal Architect at OLI Architecture, Hiroshi Okamoto. In this conversation we discuss his time working with I.M. Pei, the design of the Mu Xin Art Museum dedicated to the celebrated Chinese painter, scholar, poet and writer, and designing spaces for the work of American sculpture artist Richard Serra.
This week, we talk with Martino Stierli, MOMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, about MOMA’s current exhibition entitled The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985.
This week, we talk with Aneesha Dharwadker, assistant professor in architecture and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of the recently published article Dystopia’s Ghost. In this episode, we revisit the remaking of New Delhi’s Central Vista project, its design, politics, and history.
This week, we talk with Randhir Singh about his life as an architectural photographer, which he pursues, not just as an art, but as a way of architectural thinking itself. From the art and craft of the making of a photograph, to the final presentation in MOMA, Randhir Singh walks us through his methods and philosophy on the art of architectural photography.
How does the idea of a “Nation” come through in architectural language? Is there such a thing as a Nigerian architecture, for example? Are there national identifications visible in architectural makeup? On the other hand, how does architecture transcend borders? What is the status of Modernism in architecture in these various places? This week, we dive into these larger questions as we dissect the recently published series Sub-Saharan Africa Edited by Philipp Meuser, Adil Dalbai, and Livingstone Mukasa.
This week we sit down with Prof. Richard Williams of the Edinburgh College of Art to discuss his recently published book Reyner Banham Revisited
Once again, we travel back in time with architectural historian and theorist William J.R. Curtis for Part two of this conversation. We pick up right where we left off, rumbling through the dusty roads of India with William on his way to meet Balkrishna Doshi, the living link between the force that is Corbusian Modernism in India and deep, deep Indian tradition.
This week, we travel back in time with architectural historian and theorist William J.R. Curtis and his reading of the narrative of Indian Modernism. Part one of a two part series, Curtis and Prakash focus today’s conversation on the life and work of Aditya Prakash, the nature and production of Modernism in India, and Curtis’ own engagement with Indian Modernism.
The modernist legacy has helped proliferate the current environmental crisis on a global scale. In architecture, what is to be done to address this civilizational problem? Could oracular visions be a way to rethink how we practice and teach architecture? Join us for this week's conversation with Mark Jarzombek, professor at MIT and co-director of the Office of [Un]certainty Research.
In anticipation of the next installment of the One Continuous Line webinar series on Globalization and the Modernist City (being held online on December 13, 2021) this episode is a re-release of the previous panel discussion. This episode features guests Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani who discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.
This week, we sit down with Remi Papillault to discuss the topic of his new book, and the subject of his ongoing interests: the development of Chandigarh and Le Corbusier’s hand in its shaping.
This week, we sit down with Joseph Clarke to discuss his new book Echo’s Chamber: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space. The discussion looks at the convergence of politics, acoustics, and the metamorphosis of acoustic spatial thinking from Wagner to Le Corbusier and beyond.
This week, the subject turns back to legacy. We have a conversation with the son of Joseph Allen Stein who was an American-born architect, designing fabulous buildings across India during the Nehruvian period in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. David Stein takes us through his life growing up in India and what his understanding was of his father's life and career.
What is an architecture of the Nightrise? How might we spatialize the unseeable, or “freeze” the shadows of a conjuration? This week, we have a fascinating discussion with Mohamad Nahleh, a recent MIT graduate, about his recent personal research and graduate thesis on the night in Jabal ‘Amil in the southern reaches of Lebanon.
How might we think about architectural education differently in a post-pandemic world? What are the intersections between Covid and Climate Change? How does seeing architecture as a site of thinking impact education today? This week, we sit down with Mark Dorrian to take a deep dive into the material, political, cultural and educational realities surrounding the ongoing pandemic.
Join us this week for a far-ranging and fascinating conversation with David Turnbull, architect, thinker and educator.
Discussing his work on the transurban, Jean Louis Cohen takes us on a tour of the history of ideas that have shaped, formed, and deformed the various cities that stitch together the seams of the world. This conversation continues the ongoing conversation centering the impact of Modernism on architecture and contemporary culture in the world today.
This week, we sit down with Firoza Jhabvala, musician and daughter of Cyrus and Ruth Jhabvala. We talk about growing up with two creative parents, the trans-disciplinarity of Cyrus' Jhabvala’s architecture practice, parallels with Vikram’s own father, Aditya Prakash, and the politics of colonial and post-colonial India.
This week, we continue interrogating the modern nationalist project in India, its legacy and implications for thinking the present with Dan Williamson, professor and scholar of Mid-century Ahmedabad. We learn why and how Amedabad, a city in Western India, came to be home to some of the best and most amazing advances in Indian Modernism.
How do ideas travel across the world? How do ideas change? Why do they change? This week, we contemplate these questions in the mid-century context of the emerging Indian nation-state in the 1950s into the contemporary cultural climate we see today. Sunil Khilnani is professor of politics and history at Ashoka University and author of the book The Idea of India.
In part two of our two-part series One Continuous Line, we sit down with Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani to discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.
In part one of our two-part series One Continuous Line, we sit down with Mark Jarzombek, Anthony Vidler, Partha Mitter, and Sunil Khilnani to discuss the relevance of Indian Modernism in terms of its various contemporary postcolonial contexts.
This week, we revisit two past episodes as a preamble to the forthcoming panel discussion “One Continuous Line: is Indian MidCentury Modernism still relevant today?” In this crossover episode we discuss the project of Utopia and its colonial situatedness, modernity and its critiques, and the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.
This week, we turn the mic back on Vikram Prakash to discuss his newly published book One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash. The conversation picks up the thread of the book, mapping out and analyzing the life and multi modal work of Vikram’s father, Aditya Prakash, in Mid Century Modern India.
How might we navigate and negotiate the skins of the Earth in the face of climate change? What can Byzantine architecture and Plato’s Khôra teach us about urban living in the 21st Century? What is the role of the architect in current cultural production? This week, we have a fascinating conversation with Raoul Bunschoten, Professor of Sustainable Urban Planning and Urban Design at the TU Berlin, and founder of Chora an architectural design and urban planning group.
What was it like to grow up in the Neutra household? What memories of Richard Neutra’s early and practicing life live on in his children? This episode explores the idea of legacy and memory with Raymond Neutra, youngest child of famous Mid-Century Modern Architect Richard Neutra.
Today we talk to Shubhra Raje, Academic and Architect…and also the daughter of Anant Raje, faculty member of CEPT in Ahmedabad and an architect who worked closely with Louis Kahn on the IIM project. Today, we focus the conversation on Shubhra’s relationship with her father, how he has influenced her life and how this relationship has been formative in her own architectural and creative identity.
This week's episode invites you to look back to the 19th century with four Persian travelers making their way through a modernized Europe. In their travel diaries, we see Europe from an Occidentalist gaze, which charges these Western spaces with eroticism, magic, and wonder. What can we learn about Persian utopia from these "farangi," or foreign, narratives? Join us, for this discussion with Vahid Vahdat, assistant professor of architecture and interior design at The School of Design and Construction, Washington State University and author of the newly published Occidentalist Perceptions of European Architecture in Nineteeth-Century Persian Travel Diaries: Travels in Farangi Space.
How do moods and cultural objects work in the construction of history, politics, place? In this episode, Dipti Khera joins us to discuss her newly published book The Place of Many Moods:
Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century, which deconstructs the affects of the painted letters traditions of Northwest India on the construction of place.
We are experiencing rapidly rising global temperatures making it increasingly difficult for Earth to remain habitable. Yet, the dominant power structure of the free-market economy is not really reacting. Enter the greenhouse as the future of life in a changed climate…or is it simply a perpetuation of what got us here in the first place? Listen as Luis Berríos-Negrón traces the lineage of the greenhouse through history and critiques the deployment of the greenhouse typology as a “solution” to climate change.
What can architecture do in the time of a pandemic? What is an architecture of medical necessity? This week, we talk with Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group to discuss architecture in the time of COVID-19.
This week we look back at our miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and educators Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha. In this re-issue, the discussion touches on Mathur and Da Cunha’s concept of wetness - a re-writing of what it means to live in relationship to water - and what it means for architecture and ecological thinking in the time of Coronavirus.
This week, we continue our conversation with Sarosh Anklesaria, Shubhra Raje, and Riyaz Tayyibji about the recent developments at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM) where controversial deliberations have led to the decision to demolish a large swath of dormitories on its campus designed by Louis Kahn, architect. While this decision has been temporarily halted, it has generated much conversation surrounding the value of experience, collective and micro histories, the role of empathy within the built environment, and changing the terms of engagement with a “growth” mindset.
The basic issue is: what is the value of collective/cultural memory? What happens when we privilege certain memories over others? This week, Sarosh Anklesaria, Shubhra Raje, Riyaz Tayyibji and Vikram Prakash converse about recent developments at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM) where controversial deliberations have led to the decision to demolish a large swath of dormitories on its campus designed by Louis Kahn, architect.
The basic issue is: what do we recognize as heritage? What is worth remembering? And who decides? This week, Prem Chandavarkar and Vikram Prakash converse about recent developments at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM) where controversial deliberations have led to the decision to demolish a large swath of dormitories on its campus designed by Louis Kahn.
This week, Architecture Talk sits down with the Office of (Un)Certainty Research to find out who they are, where they are, and where they are going. Find out what it's all about!
This week, we sit down with Michael Benedikt, the 2004 ACSA Distinguished Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. In this fascinating and meandering conversation, Vikram and Michael discuss the impressions of childhood on our adult life, inter-subjectivities and the force-relations of things, spirituality in architecture, and posthuman humanism.
This week, we sit down with Architect, Urban Planner, and long-time friend Franz Ziegler to exchange thoughts on Holland and global architecture, drawing with the hand, and to reminisce on mutual experiences in India.
What's in a placename? What are the geneologies and lineages of the land we live on? As mapmaker and transdisciplinary scholar, Amir Sheikh reveals that there are many intersecting and sedimented narratives of place and placenames, in part, tell these stories. Join us as we talk with him about his work with the Waterlines project and storytelling with the shapes of time.
How might literature help inform the way we talk, think, and design the city? How differently would we build it? This week, scholar and translator Arshia Sattar brings her immense knowledge of the Hindu Epic The Ramayana to talk about ethics, morality, sensuality, and space and how we might imagine a city of changing shape.
This week, we gain new perspectives on architectural pedagogy today in the time of Zoom University and Coronavirus as we speak with long-time educator and architectural practitioner Neelkanth Chhaya. Fresh off the success of a fully online studio titled Poche, Neelkanth reflects on studio culture and pedagogy today and in the past.
From the catwalk to the department store, there are many modalities of showcasing high fashion. In the realm of window displays, how do you draw people in? For Peter Mohlmam, it's all about seduction. This week, we dive into the wickedly beguiling world of the Window Witch - where fashion design and architecture meet and design is life.
“1970s Israel was a period of taking things that were constructed and making them into things that are taken for granted, that become 2nd nature, that you don’t question.” This week, we are joined by Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, head of the Arenson Built Heritage Research Center in Haifa, Israel. This conversation looks at the question and problem of modernism and its relation to the formation of the nation-state, particularly as it relates to Israel and India.
What happens when your home becomes your laboratory for architectural learning and speculation? According to Nandan Balsavar, Zoom enables his students to incorporate the oral histories from generations of family members into regular lessons. This week, we’ll be discussing architectural pedagogy, culturally inherited forms of knowledge, and teaching under the regime of Zoom with educator and architect Nandan Balsavar!
This week we end our miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with Grounded founder and Principal Architect Anjali Mangalgiri. The discussion touches on motherhood, architectural thinking, sustainability, and Anjali’s memories that led her to pursue architecture.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with two distinct discussions. The first conversation, with Rachel Minnery, AIA, asks what does it mean to plan in the face of unknowable risk? The second, with Patrick MacLeamy, former CEO of HOK, discusses the history and culture of HOK, the future of design firms in a changing world, and firm strategies during a recessive economy.
This week, we sit down with Lydia Kallipoliti, an award-winning architect, engineer, scholar and curator and an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. The conversation traverses many scales - from the individual to the environment and world - looking closely at the culture of hygiene and the architecture of confinement and how these technologies are connected to the politics of the body in the time of Coronavirus.
The Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus miniseries continues this week with Frankfurt-based educator, theorist, and architect Nikolaus Hirsch. Host Vikram Prakash and Nikolaus Hirsch speculate on the architecture school of the future, posthumanism as a framework for transdisciplinary practices, and question what architecture is and could be.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with two distinct, yet parallel discussions. The first conversation, with Benedikt Hartl of Opposite Office, probes the possibilities in future-driven narrative architecture to achieve sustainability and resiliency in the face of climate change, pandemics, and the unknown. The second, with Ryan Scavnicky of Extra Office, discusses the internet meme as a tool for critiquing and reframing the culture around architecture and looks to Object-Oriented Ontology as a philosophical framework for speculation in architecture.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and educators Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha. Here, the discussion touches on Mathur and Da Cunha’s concept of wetness - a re-writing of what it means to live in relationship to water - and what it means for architecture and ecological thinking in the time of Coronavirus.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architect, biomimicist and educator Ilaria Mazzoleni. In this chat we see that the “eco-laboratory” is an apt metaphor to describe the body, architecture, and manifestations of “living” at various scales.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with urban theorist AbdouMaliq Simone where we discuss his work on inter-relational subjectivities in the creation of new urban conditions, his personal response and experience with the Corona virus, and his response to the protests around Black Lives Matter.
How do we re-think what is essential? How does the spiritual influence design thinking? How can we understand the poetics of transgression in the design world? This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and Nisha Mathew and Soumitro Ghosh.
How do we re-think what is essential? How does the spiritual influence design thinking? How can we understand the poetics of transgression in the design world? This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architects and Nisha Mathew and Soumitra Ghosh.
This week we continue with the mini series Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with a transnational discussion on COVID19 response in India with architect Manit Rastogi. Here, we examine the social, political, and architectural implications of a pandemic on an individual to a city level.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architect and theorist Prem Chandavarkar. In this episode, we dissect how the Corona virus highlights marginalized communities, how it changes the ways in which we think about governance, and we ask what are the mechanisms by which we construct the notion of the city?
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with guest Mark Wigley, Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP. In this episode, we dissect how the Corona virus reinforces social inequities, how it changes the ways in which we communicate, what it means to live in a city during a pandemic, and what the role of the architect is in these uncertain conditions.
This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with guest Dr. Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at MIT. In this episode, we look beyond the individual and beyond North America to turn our heads towards the Middle East and the aggravated complexities that have arisen in these challenging times.
This week, in our ongoing series Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus, we sit down with Tanya Wells of the musical act Seven Eyes to discuss the intersections of music and architecture. We ask about her catalogue of experiences during this global pandemic, the cross-culturality of their music, and her transnational upbringing that informs her craft now.
What can architecture do in the time of a pandemic? What is an architecture of medical necessity? This week, we talk with Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group to discuss architecture in the time of COVID-19.
How do we design against extinction in the time of Corona virus? This week, we talk with Dr. Mitchell Joachim and Nicholas Gervasi of TerreformOne about working within the Earth’s metabolism and with actual living organisms to reconfigure what design means in changing times.
Image: Central California History Museum: Proto-Formal Section by Perry Kulper 2006
What is architecture and what is its frontier of thinking in the time of Corona virus? This week, we talk with architect and architectural thinker Perry Kulper about his work methods, inspirations, drawing techniques, and thoughts on the current pandemic.
What is Living Architecture? What are alternative modes of being and building in the world? What are the implications of the Coronavirus as a living system and how might that impact what architecture might be?
What is architecture and what is its frontier of thinking in the time of Corona Virus? This week, we talk with WAI Think Tank about their backgrounds, their multi-dimensional practice, and how they think architecture will be affected by this global pandemic.
This week, Vikram sits down with young professionals Sarah Burk, Siyu Qu and Will Crothers to talk about the scene, culture, aesthetic, and ethics of Seattle’s practicing architectural community in the city today.
This week, Vikram and veteran guest, Mark Jarzombek, meet at MIT to discuss the status of the Global Project. This was recorded in front of an audience of Mark's students and teaching assistants who participated in a Q&A following our episode.
A Global History of Architecture, Wiley, 2rd Ed.
For Americans, it was the Vietnam War. For Vietnam and Laos, It was The American War. Next week, we are joined by photographers Pao Houa Her and Sadie Wechsler as we discuss relationships of the war, both past and present, within their current collaborative exhibit, The American War.
Image credit: Sadie Wechsler
This week, we are joined by prolific architect of northwest modernism, Gordon Walker as we discuss Grant Hildebrand’s biography, “Gordon Walker, A Poetic Architecture”
Published by Arcade, July 2, 2019
Image: Lucia | Marquand
What can we learn about an urban environment when we understand it, both socially and spatially, as an ecology? This week, we investigate the intersection of environmental justice and public space with sociologist, Amita Baviskar as we discuss her new book, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi
Sage Publications, Dec. 19, 2019
How can a piece of music describe moving through an architectural space? For composer Bright Sheng, it’s all about the structure. This week, we’ll be discussing music, architecture and process with the globally renowned conductor, composer, pianist and educator!
This week, we welcome in the new year with a stunning discussion on the relationship between dance and the spaces we perform in with Chair to University of Washington’s department of dance, Jennifer Salk.
Image: "Murmur" work by Jennifer Salk and D Chase Angier on site at Chateau Le Coste Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France, 2018
This week, we investigate settlement, agency, pedagogy and architecture's tireless hope for utopia with esteemed professor of architecture history and criticism at The Cooper Union, Anthony Vidler.
Image: "Warped Space", Anthony Vidler. MIT Press, 2002
Here in the United States, we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the midst of all the feasting, we were not able to release a new episode. But we would love for you to revisit one of our favorite episodes from last season, Transversality: Klee, Kahn and the Persian Imagination with Shima Mohajeri.
This week, we discuss the booming industry that is Indian Cinema, the Cinema House and Bollywood with Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Washington, Sudhir Mahadevan.
This week, we are joined by architect and artist, Anthony Pellecchia, as he shares with us his perspective on the profession of architecture, and his path from Hoboken, New Jersey, through the office of Louis Kahn, to a love of conceptual practice.
Image: "Skyline", Anthony Pellecchia
This week, we discuss thin shell concrete and the work of Jack Christiansen as "Sculpture On a Grand Scale" with structural engineer and University of Washington, Professor of architecture, Tyler Sprague.
Finding your place in the field of architecture, particularly as a woman of color, can be complicated. This week, Renée Cheng, Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, helps us unpack how she found herself becoming a leading architecture educator, forging new paths for diversity and interdisciplinary thinking in an increasingly challenging and hierarchic world.
This week, we invite Architect, Historian and Educator, Peter Scriver to share with us his story of uncovering a love of Architecture History through Indian Modernism. Peter Scriver is an associate professor at the University of Adelaide in the school of architecture and built environment.
Image: After The Masters, Vikram Bhatt and Peter Scriver, Mapin Pub. 1990
This week, we conclude our editor’s choice series with an episode to inspire new possibilities in how we can approach issues of, and futures within our changing climate. We will hear two approaches to how we might re-imagine our relationship with climate. From Daniel Barber we will hear a conversation that focuses on contemporary issues in how we envision sustainability as a movement and culture. And our second conversation, with Dilip da Cunha re-imagines, not how we relate to climate necessarily, but how we define, culturally and physically, what our environment is.
This week, in honor of our 50th episode, we will be hearing from two incredible architects as they describe their pursuits of the indescribable. This special editors choice edition combines our conversation with Javier Sanchez as well as our conversation with Pritzker Prize winning architect, B.V. Doshi.
THIS WEEK, as the second episode in our Editor’s Choice Edition, we revisit conversations with Nicole Huber and Yomi Braester as we investigate the art of storytelling through architecture and film.
This week, we kick off our summer long Editor's Choice series! This week, we re-visit our conversations with Jeff Hou and Manish Chalana as well as Rahul Mehrotra to see if we can start to unpack what it is that makes a city vibrant!
For the season finale of ArchitectureTalk, we put our esteemed host, Vikram Prakash in the hot seat in a special edition conversation lead by ArchitectureTalk veteran, Ayad Rahmani!
We live in a complex ecology of "wetness" that has been reduced down to the "ontological violence" called a "river", argues Dilip Da Cunha in today's conversation, based on his new book The Invention of Rivers: Alexander's Eye and Ganga's Descent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). An architect and planner, Dilip is a Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at Harvard GSD. He is partner with Anuradha Mathur in the practice Mathur/Da Cunha.
This week, we discuss augmentation, artificial intelligence and architecture of the mind with Rajesh Rao. Rajesh is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington where he also directs the Neural Systems Laboratory.
Image: Brain-Computer Interfacing: An Introduction, Rajesh P. N. Rao (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
This week we speak with Sonal Khullar, Associate Professor Art History, on modern Indian art, nationalism, feminism and interdisciplinarity, based on her book Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity and Modernism in India, 1930-1990.(University of California Press, 2015)
This week, we discuss nomadism, connection and intercultural dialogue with architect and urbanist, Kunlé Adeyemi. Kunlé is founding Principal at NLÉ Works.
This week we discuss inter-species relationships, and inter-species thinking, and its consequences for architecture, with Radhika Govindrajan. Radhika is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington who has recently published her book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas.
Today we discuss Michael Pollen's How to Change Your Mind, and the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics in terms of its implications for architectural thinking. Discussion topics include design studio pedagogy, creativity, the art of the podcast and the relationship between practice and the design studio. Sean Lally is the host of the Night White Skiespodcast.
Today we examine the sketchbooks of Dutch architect and urban designer Frits Palmboom and understand drawing as a kind of quasi spiritual adoration of the landscape. We also discuss the role of tracing and errors in design thinking, as also the differences between the Indian, European and American city.
Today we speak with activist designer Sergio Palleroni, who has been taking students around the world to work with disadvantaged communities to make a difference, to build with them and to teach students how they can learn from building with them. We discuss the politics of design-build activism, and what that implies in terms of asking the brick what it wants to be!
“All of those natural materials - stone, wood - we’ve always seen ourselves in them, in some way.”
Today we engage in a broad-ranging discussion on the contemporary and future applications of what are considered to be vernacular or traditional materials with architect and professor Elizabeth Golden. Besides their structural, economic and political entanglements, our conversation also veers towards the spiritual and intangible ramifications of working with non-modernist materials.
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“[Transversality] can assert itself at any time into reality and not stay in a utopian mode.” Today we embark on a magical journey between cultures, between times, and between conceptions of time and space in a fascinating conversation with architectural historian Shima Mohajeri, who has just published a fantastic book entitled Architectures of Transversality: Paul Klee, Louis Kahn and the Persian Imagination (Routledge: 2018) www.architecturetalk.org
“We have to not take things as given, but rather tap into [our] own imaginaries, into [our] own yearnings, and longings, as an alternative world.”
Today we discuss the potential of architecture as the work of the perennially unfinished project, as a site for transgression, as the other to utopia and fundamentalism. Nicole Huber is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Discussion topics include: Fiction making, post-critical architecture, Tarkovsky and science fiction, surrealism and design thinking.
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“Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?” - VP
“Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” - MJ
In today's episode, we engage in a far-ranging and open-ended discussion on the question of the global with my longtime collaborator Mark Jarzombek. Circulating around the question of the larger agenda of the global, discussion topics include the modernity and its critiques, the nation-state and its limits, autobiography and its pitfalls, and what are the ways in which global thinking (dis)connects with deconstruction.
2:31 Magdalenian culture and civilization: the caves. The Gravettians.
4:09 A Global History of Architecture textbook + GAHTC: what is this global project?
6:50 Modernism, Postmodernism, and the critical question of the “after the modern”
11:23 Modernism as dualism: the good and the bad in equal doses, continuously, vs a Hegelian dialectic (destruction at the end)
13:30 “How to develop a critique that doesn’t entrap you into being complicit in one side of the game or the other side of the game?” -MJ
‘Isn’t this desire for objectivity a modernist sentiment?’ -VP
14:26 “Where does one enter, and where does one exit out of the modern?” -MJ
17:43 Ethics, rights, powers, and personal agency
19:00 Give money to Greenpeace but not on the boat: individual agency and the social matrix
21:06 “Ethical in a particular way,” haunting to one’s subject-position
22:26 The shadowy terror of monotheism
23:35 The ‘Global’ as an ethics-opening term
25:04 Parallels and intersections of global histories with the craziness emerging with quantum theory in astrophysics
27:24 Uncertainty, possibility, and knowing (Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad)
28:04 What the people in Lascaux and Chauvet knew
28:14 “This sounds a little Hindu-ish to me, a little Vishnu,” and the conflicted presence of singular Judaism
34:36 Modernism and a vortex of non-dualities
36:42 Derrida as a “renegade rabbi”: reading from the margins
37:38 Connection between new materialism, French poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Jewish philosophy and Buddhist thinking?
39:06 No singular global can apply to everything
39:13 Biography as entry? Significance of personal epistemologies in critical thinking of the world.
43:58 “Vishnu-Modernism”
45:35 the Post-Holocaust vs the Post-Colonial Global
1:00:20 Limitations of Derrida’s critiques: ethics and Buddha’s ear to the ground
1:03:19 “Other oralities need to be known.”: this is the global history project
1:05:33 “Writing on writing. Writing on writing on writing.” Iterations.
1:07:37 Writing corrodes oral-communicative structures
This week, we discuss the work, the working style and legacy of the late Catalonian architect, Enric Miralles with our guest Ayad Rahmani. Ayad is a Professor of Architecture at Washington State University.
Image: Floor Plan of Hostalets Civic Center, El Croquis Magazine, 1995
This week, we discuss global history in our conversation with Amit Srivastava, Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, on post-postcolonial history and historiography in the Indian Ocean context. Discussion topics include: history of the modern architecture of India, globalization and contemporary South Asian architecture and infrastructural history versus 'big-name' architectural history.
Today we speculate about life, the purposes of life and architectural thinking with Danish architect Lene Tranberg, founding partner of Lundgaard & Tranberg in Copenhagen, Denmark. Discussion topics include: Phenomenology, the body in space, intuition as embedded knowledge, transcendence, doubt, translation, and striving to understand the interwoven character of material and place.
This week we discuss the GAHTC module on Climate and Global History with Daniel Barber, Chair of the graduate Architecture group at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. discussion topics include: ecology in non-modernist cultures, tropical modernism, new narratives of ecological thinking, designing for discomfort, and architecture as the mediation between the infrastructural and the personal. Image: Victor and Aladar Olgyay at the Princeton Architectural Laboratory, c. 1955
A great conversation with Seattle’s great conversation starter, John Boylan. We’ll discuss art and science, engineering, technology, industry and the potential of rigorous inquiry in both scientific and artistic explorations. John is a respected member of Seattle's technology community and instigator of interdisciplinary creative works such as 9e2 Seattle.
We discuss the value and challenges of conceptual architectural practice with Seattle based architect Rob Hutchison. Discussion topics include: death and memory, memory versus intuition, dedication, client relations and the emotional engines of design.
In this conversation with Yomi Breaester, Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington, we discuss the many ways in which cinema and new media practices intersection with architecture as aesthetic and political practices. Discussion topics include: the chronotype, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect, and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.
THIS WEEK, we talk to Richard Williams about sex, Mad Men, James Bond and of course, architecture. Richard is a Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art where he heads the History of Art subject area. Don’t miss this candid discussion of all things sexy in the contemporary built world.
For the premiere of ArchitectureTalk Season 2, we will be discussing the countours, ambitions and politics of World History, especially in terms of material culture, with University of Washington historian Anand Yang. While focussed on Anand's work on Indian Ocean trade and convict ship convoys that plied there during the colonial period. Our discussion covers connected topics such as subaltern studies, nationalism, the regional vs the global, convict labor and civil society, the Protestant work ethic and Big history.
Announcing Season 2, starting September 12, 2018! Upcoming conversation topics include world history, Asian cinema, conceptual practice and sex and architecture. Stay tuned!
We are reissuing one of our seminal conversations with Dominick LaCapra on Transference and Architecture to get you into the mood for our second round of conversations.
In this SPECIAL EDITION we talk with Warren Etheredge, critic, screenwriter, teacher and charismatic co-founder with Tom Skerritt of The Film School. Warren is also the author of TheWarrenReport and host of the podcast, The High Bar. Over a meal in the University of Washington Faculty Club, we discuss his career, screenwriting and the importance of storytelling, emotional vulnerability and honesty in film. We explore the art, craft (and crap) of cinema and design and interrogate issues of practice, celebrity, consumer culture, profit, auteurship and aesthetics in filmmaking and architecture through the work of Kubrick, Tarkovsky and others.
SOURCE: Afroditi Psarra
We talk to multidisciplinary artist, Afroditi Psarra (Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Washington) about her work with electronic textiles, "alienesque" aesthetics, soft circuits and our the new relationships that we have to establish between our bodies and responsive technologies. Discussion topics include: collaborative practice, DIY culture, parametic design, bio-feedback, open-source working and the uncanny.