Architecturetalk

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 Skies podcast.

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.   www.architecturetalk.org  

“[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.   www.architecturetalk.org  

  “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