Memes are increasingly permeating architectural discourse, with Instagram accounts like Dank Lloyd Wright “holding models of power to account, especially when power manifests as aesthetics.” The meme itself, in Dank Lloyd Wright’s hands, is a sophisticated visual tool, with its own codes, styles and languages that mirror the ever-shifting currents of internet culture. DLW’s critiques and the debates around them take place almost exclusively online, and in the comments section of their...

Since its conception in the 1960’s, the Fun Palace has circulated widely in architecture culture, and mainly through its provocative collages, characterized by giant space-frame trusses framing a flexible shed of interactive cultural events, accessible to all. These images persist as inspiring propositions for a new physical infrastructure of cultural exchange, and while they are often primarily attributed to Cedric Price, the project was actually the result of close collaboration between...

Markus Lateenmaaki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia.  It’s worth noting this episode was recorded in early 2022, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine; in fact the discussion doesn’t focus on contemporary Russian politics and culture, but instead reflects on the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the ways in which Russian people altered and re-framed the...

In 2020 The Memorial to Enslaved Labourers opened at the University of Virginia, designed as a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Mabel O. Wilson, landscape architects Gregg Bleam and Frank Dukes, and the artist Eto Otitigbe.  As Wilson has explained, “civic buildings and monuments in the U.S. are often emblematic of a disavowal of the founding precepts of liberty, equality and justice, where they become sites to imagine and enact American whiteness.” In this episode Wilson...

Parc de la Villette was emblematic of the strong ties made between the disciplines of architecture and philosophy in the1980's, where “Deconstructivism” in particular became a theoretical framework through which buildings and landscapes were both designed and interpreted.  Visual fragmentation and conceptual links to semiotic analysis characterised this period of architecture, and originating in projects such as Chora L. Works. A collaboration between Peter Eisenman and Jaques Derrida, the...

Much of Mark Wallinger’s art exists in public space. He’s made films and performance pieces set in tube stations and airports, and was the first artist to occupy the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 1999.  In this episode, Wallinger discusses the installation “State Britain”, which reconstructs a protest encampment originally erected in Parliament Square by the peace activist Brian Haw (in opposition to UK foreign policy in Iraq). The encampment was dismantled in 2006 under a new...

When we think about public space, we tend to consider the street, the plaza, the park or the square - urban spaces for people to engage in civic life. In this episode Jonas Žukauskas discusses his consideration of the forest as a space of social engagement, in relation to the project “Forest Parts”.  Initiated in 2019 in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė, Forest Parts is ongoing project that, as Žukauskas and Daubaraitė explain, “offers to perceive the forest as an infrastructure formed by...

Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Second World War. In March 2022, as Russian forces attempted to take Kyiv, missiles once again struck the land near the mass grave. The attack was likely an attempt to destroy Kyiv’s largest TV tower, and five civilians were killed. While not the deadliest missile strike to hit Kyiv, it was perhaps the most symbolic.  In this episode...

The concrete-lined LA River was built on top of a sprawling floodplain, which the land artist Lauren Bon seeks to reveal through a large-scale infrastructural project called “Bending the River Back to the City”. By diverting a small amount of water from the river, lifting it, cleansing it, and spreading it to a network of public parks, (its former floodplain), she renders the utilitarian water management system as an accessory of public delight and education, and begins the long process of...

The Dalston Eastern Curve garden began as a meanwhile scheme, but over the past decade has embedded itself at the centre of one of London’s most rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods; over time the garden has become an act of resistance against commercially-driven development, reimagining the site instead as a communal oasis. In this episode Liza Fior tells the story of how the curve garden, which was a project designed in collaboration between muf architecture / art and J&L Gibbons, evolved...

Life is more virtual than ever, but in this intensely divided moment, it's arguably our streets, squares, plazas and monuments where power remains most contested. How does a garden become an act of resistance against gentrification? How can an urban park expose a pre-colonial landscape? What are the boundaries of protest in public space? And what role does architecture play in the the stories we tell ourselves about our collective histories, hopes and dreams? Coming soon from Drawing Matter...