The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dy ... Show More
Oct 5
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden with Timothy Mowl (Reaktion, 2026)
Regency gardens dazzled with colour, invention and theatricality: trellises heavy with roses and jasmine, shrubberies designed for intrigue and lawns enlivened with pools, grottoes and fanciful ornaments. Yet behind this world of perfume and spectacle lay a striking social shift. ... Show More
30m 30s
Sep 20
Damian White and Nicholas Pevzner, "Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Environmental politics is clearly at an impasse, increasingly foreclosed by a fragmenting elite consensus on climate change, an escalating populist backlash on the right, and a pervasive sense of climate doom on the left. This book considers what new openings might be offered by ... Show More
31m 26s
Sep 17
Jim Gaona Ellis, "Educators As Designers: The Hidden Architecture of Learning" (Harvard Education Press, 2026)
An invitation to K-12 educators to reimagine their roles through the transformative lens of design In Educators as Designers, Jim Gaona Ellis draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the latest UDL guidelines to position teachers as creators, innovators, and problem-solve ... Show More
50m 50s
Aug 2025
Marianna Charitonidou: Drawing, meaning and modernism.
In the newest episode of the A is for Architecture Podcast, I spoke to the architect, historian and theorist Dr Marianna Charitonidou about her fairly recent book, Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices: Architecture’s Changing Scope in the 20th Century, which she publis ... Show More
53m 47s
Jan 2024
Susanna Phillips Newbury, "The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one anot ... Show More
35m 21s
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