In Episode 106 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ Sabina Andron talks about her book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City, which she published with Routledge this year.

The book discusses ‘the surfacescapes of our cities […] as material, visual, and legal territories [and] includes a critical history of graffiti and street art as contested surface discourses’ arguing for ‘surfaces as sites of resistance against private property, neoliberal creativity, and the imposition of urban order.’

Sabina is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cities and Urbanism at the University of Melbourne and can be found on her personal website, as well as on social media, including X and Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

Episode 105 of ⁠A is for Architecture⁠ is with Pier Vittorio Aureli, writer and educator, and founder and principal of Dogma, the much-acclaimed architecture and research group founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio and Martino Tattara. We talk about Pier Vittorio's 2023 book, Architecture and Abstraction, published by MIT Press.

Architecture and Abstraction, so the gloss has it, ‘argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials, [this book] presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries’, and the outcome of emergent socio-technical, economic and political realities. In the face of the AI-ification of the public imagination and, increasingly, material culture itself, this argument has great pertinence for design in and of the contemporary commonwealth.

Pier Vittorio Aureli teaches at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and can be found on through Dogma on Instagram.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick

In Episode 104 of A is for Architecture, is a conversation with Paul Watt about his 2021 book, Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London, published by Bristol University Press in 2021.

We discuss the story of council-supplied housing, and its transformation through various governments – not just Maggie’s Conservatives – from a common asset and social good, into an instrument of urban regeneration policy that has at its heart a very different image of the city, predicated a new model of the desired and desirable urban citizen.

Estate Regeneration draws on Paul’s deep knowledge and experience and extensive fieldwork ‘in some of the capital’s most deprived areas’ and shows ‘the dramatic ways that estate regeneration is reshaping London, fuelling socio-spatial inequalities via state-led gentrification’. It’s an important work of deep scholarship, for sure.

Paul is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and can also be found on LinkedIn and Twitter/ X.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick