Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Simone Ferracina's book Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet (Routledge, 2022) re-thinks potentiality―an object’s ability to change―in architecture and design.
The book problematizes the still-prevailing moder ... Show More
Today
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)
An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostentatious display of goods in the service of social status. In the field of architectural history, scholars have employed Veblen in suppor ... Show More
39m 36s
Nov 23
Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)
Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Repeater, 2025) by Tom White traces the international history of the asbestos disaster — from mining operations in apartheid South Afr ... Show More
39m 40s
Nov 17
John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)
In The Castle: A History (Yale University Press, 2022) Dr. John Goodall presents a vibrant history of the castle in Britain, from the early Middle Ages to the present day.
The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military ... Show More
56m 49s
May 2022
51. Why Possibilism is the Future with Architect Michael Pawlyn
<p>Michael Pawlyn is a biomimicry expert, TED talk star and founding director of the London-based practice Exploration Architecture, he is also co-author with Singapore-based urbanist, curator and writer Sarah Ichioka of the book Flourish: Design Paradigms for our Planetary Emerg ... Show More
36m 20s
Feb 2024
Climate Salon: A sustainable approach to aesthetics with Kathrin Gimmel, Morten Emil Engel and Andrew Corney
In the final episode of Dezeen and SketchIUp's Climate Salon podcast series, architects discuss why sustainability should guide the aesthetics of a building, as opposed to the reverse. Swiss-Danish architect Kathrin Gimmel, MEE Studio founder Morten Emil Engel and SketchUp's Andr ... Show More
43m 26s
Sep 2023
Marc Bonners, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)
What role do algorithms play in the construction of images and the representation of the world and weather in computer games? How does the design of rooms, levels and topographies influence the decisions and behavior of the players? Is Brutalism the first genuine architectural st ... Show More
45m 48s
May 2020
The Future of Design Education is Flexibility
With pretty much every design student in the world learning remotely, it’s a good moment to talk about the state of design education at the college and university level. To train a well-rounded designer, the number of things students need to learn increases every year, but the am ... Show More
44m 46s
Jun 2021
Skylar Tibbits, "Things Fall Together: A Guide to the New Materials Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2021)
Things in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today’s researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These ... Show More
50m 30s
Jul 2023
Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius, "Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum" (Archive Books, 2022)
Awkward Archives: Ethnographic Drafts for a Modular Curriculum (Archive Books, 2022) proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logi ... Show More
50m 32s