New Books in Architecture
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- 13. Nov. 2026
Über den Podcast
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture
Folgen 435
Beyond the Yurt: Rethinking Mongolian Architecture and Identity
What can architecture tell us about Mongolian identity, history, and cultural belonging? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Ning Ao is joined by Nandin and Lingchen Kong to explore Mongolian …
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What can architecture tell us about Mongolian identity, history, and cultural belonging? In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Ning Ao is joined by Nandin and Lingchen Kong to explore Mongolian architecture, from its historical roots and traditional forms to its presence in contemporary society. How have Mongolian architectural traditions evolved in response to changing social and political contexts? What happens when traditional architectural forms meet modern urban development? And how does architecture reflect, preserve, and reshape ideas of Mongolian identity?
Nandin is a Mongolian architect and partner and design director at the architecture and design film, PLAT ASIA.
Lingchen Kong is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the University of Cambridge.
This episode is hosted by Ning Ao, a PhD candidate at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
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Somaesthetic Design with Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely (Transcript Publishing, 2026)
Over the past twenty-five years, design practice has expanded from making objects to shaping experiences that unfold in-time. As this expansion has accelerated, designers have gained powerful new tools – but …
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Over the past twenty-five years, design practice has expanded from making objects to shaping experiences that unfold in-time. As this expansion has accelerated, designers have gained powerful new tools – but often without a shared language for shaping embodied experience. Somaesthetic Design: The Experiencing Body and the Dynamics of Time responds by focusing on the experiencing body as a key source of design knowledge. Drawing from embodied practices and performance traditions, Michael Arnold Mages and Stephen Neely give designers a shared vocabulary and framework for understanding, crafting, and evaluating lived experience as it is felt and sustained in time.
Michael Arnold Mages (PhD) is a designer, strategist, and musician. He teaches in the Information Design and Data Visualization and Experience Design programs at Northeastern University, where he is an assistant professor of design in the Department of Art & Design, and director of the Health and Wellness Design Lab.
Stephen Neely (PhD) is a teacher, conductor, theorist, and clinician who lectures and presents workshops in the fields of design, music, architecture, and pedagogy. He is the Milton and Cynthia Friedman associate professor of music and director of graduate studies for the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music.
Kelvin Vu is a designer and dancer interested in the intersection of the performing arts, public space, and public knowledge.
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The Phoenix Rises: On Restoring Notre Dame Cathedral with Philippe Villeneuve
Philippe Villeneuve has been chief architect of Notre Dame Cathedral since 2013. On the night of the shocking 2019 fire, he learned by phone that the building he had loved since boyhood, and modeled in …
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Philippe Villeneuve has been chief architect of Notre Dame Cathedral since 2013. On the night of the shocking 2019 fire, he learned by phone that the building he had loved since boyhood, and modeled in miniature at just 16, was burning.
In this conversation with host Ryan Shinkel, he traces how a career spent restoring fire-damaged monuments prepared him for the five-year effort to bring the cathedral back, and explains why he describes the result not as a restoration but as a restitution. Along the way he makes the case for Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as the father of his discipline, defends the judgment of the craftsman against the certainties of computer modeling, and recounts the three “miracles” he found in the ruins. Underneath it all runs a striking humility: the conviction that he is a single point in a long story, preparing the cathedral for generations he will never meet.
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Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660 with Fatima Quraishi (UNC Press, 2026)
Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if …
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Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Maklī became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.
In Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660 (UNC Press, 2026), Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Maklī’s built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Maklī, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City with Michael Dillon (Yale UP, 2026)
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 …
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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 Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.
Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes.
Michael joins the show today to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the first special economic zones was a mistake.
Michael Dillon is professor of history and an affiliate of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. An expert on modern Chinese history, politics, and society, he is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, a history of modern China, and biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghai. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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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 …
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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. In a domain long defined by men, women began to play an active role, influencing Humphry Repton and other designers to realize their visions of pleasure grounds. These gardens became stages for al fresco entertainments, displays of taste and private encounters alike.
All Around Is Fairy Ground: Pleasure and the Regency Garden (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Timothy Mowl offers the first sustained account of ornamental gardening in Regency Britain, revealing a vivid, feminine-inflected landscape where horticulture, fashion and sociability intertwined – and where artistry still resonates two centuries later.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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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 …
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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 a labor-centered transition focused on our creative agency and our collective capacities to design new worlds.
Whilst political mobilizations and smart policy are vital for making progress on decarbonization, Designing the Just Transition: Design-Politics, Labor, and the Battle for Post-Carbon Futures (Bloomsbury, 2026) suggests that a more environmentally and socially just future will also have to be materialized and built, coded and created, imagined, desired, and enacted by many hands, many skills and many forms of visible and invisible design labor. The mainstream design industry is not to be trusted. Nevertheless, this book brings political ecology and environmental-labor studies into dialogue with critical design praxis, activism, and scholarship. It critically appraises traditions of worker-centered design, ecological and regional planning, sustainable and climate-smart architecture, and 'design when everyone designs.'
Rather than embracing a scolding green politics of limits or techno-utopian propaganda, Designing the Just Transition points to a wealth of resources for thinking about how we still might engage in democratic world-making on a warmer, more restless, and more turbulent planet.Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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 …
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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-solvers, empowering them to craft classroom experiences that are not only accessible, but also inspiring, inclusive, and responsive to every student's unique needs. This timely and original book challenges readers to see themselves not just as implementers, but as architects capable of reshaping learning cultures and opportunities for all students. At the heart of this work is a practical toolkit that seamlessly bridges powerful design concepts--such as affordances, choice architecture, hostile design, and the design cycle--with everyday classroom realities. Gaona Ellis offers engaging vignettes, actionable strategies, and a concrete change management framework that honor teachers' expertise while guiding them to collaborate, ideate, and iterate solutions. The book doesn't shy away from addressing systemic inequities, instead arming educators with the language, habits, and mindset to foster learner agency, equity, and belonging--regardless of external constraints or shifting DEI mandates. More than a guide, this is an invitation to innovate, co-create, and lead. With storytelling at its core and a focus on practical impact, this book will inspire educators and school leaders to bring fresh clarity, delight, and possibility to their practice--one designed solution at a time.
Jim Gaona Ellis is an educator, consultant, and storyteller exploring the intersections of culture, belonging, and instructional design.
Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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Marita Sturken, "Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era" (NYU Press, 2022)
Terrorism in American Memory argues that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and all that followed in its wake were the primary force shaping United States politics and culture in the post-9/11 era. Marita Sturken …
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Terrorism in American Memory argues that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and all that followed in its wake were the primary force shaping United States politics and culture in the post-9/11 era. Marita Sturken maintains that during the past two decades, when the country was subjected to terrorist attacks and promulgated ongoing wars of aggression, we have veered into increasingly polarized factions and been extraordinarily preoccupied with memorialization and the politics of memory. The post-9/11 era began with a hunger for memorialization and it ended with massive protests over police brutality that demanded the destruction of historical monuments honoring racist historical figures. Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (NYU Press, 2022) sheds light on the struggles over who is memorialized, who is forgotten, and what that politics of memory reveals about the United States as an imaginary and a nation.
Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997), Thelma & Louise (2000, reissued 2020), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, 4th edition 2025), Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (2007), and Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (2022). She is currently working on a project about the history of amateur photography in the American culture from Kodak to Polaroid to the iPhone. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
Chris Millington is Professor of Modern European History and lead of the Histories and Cultures of Conflict research group at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of eight books including Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe ((Manchester University Press, 2025), The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford University press, 2023), and France in the Second World War Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
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Aonghus MacKechnie, "Edinburgh: City of Romanticism" (Lund Humphries, 2026)
Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This …
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Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism, due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel, Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others.
Edinburgh: City of Romanticism (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how Edinburgh’s Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals, and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that countless tourists come daily to see.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Beth Weinstein, "Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time" (Routledge, 2024)
Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024) examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments: unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated …
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Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024) examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments: unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency.
Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more than human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters.
Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
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Amihai Mazar and Nava Panitz-Cohen, "Tel Rehov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valle" (The Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University, 2020)
This interview with Professor Amihai Mazar was conducted by Željko Stanojević for the New Books Network. The conversation focuses on Tel Reḥov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valley, especially …
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This interview with Professor Amihai Mazar was conducted by Željko Stanojević for the New Books Network. The conversation focuses on Tel Reḥov: A Bronze and Iron Age City in the Beth-Shean Valley, especially Volume V, where the report turns from architecture and pottery to smaller objects and scientific evidence that help reconstruct life at the site.
Amihai Mazar is a leading archaeologist of ancient Israel. His research examines the Bronze and Iron Ages, archaeology and biblical history, ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, and historical geography. Tel Reḥov is especially important because it offers a rich archaeological sequence from the Beth-Shean Valley and evidence for the social, economic, and environmental history of northern Israel.
Volume V is particularly revealing because it asks what can be learned from material that might appear secondary beside monumental architecture. Its first part examines clay, bone, stone and gypsum vessels; grinding stones and other stone implements; metal objects and metallurgical evidence; beads; objects connected with textile production; scale weights; and lithics. Together, these finds illuminate household work, craft activity, exchange, measurement, and technology.
The volume also analyzes the spatial distribution of finds in a distinctive group of ninth-century BCE buildings in Area C. Archaeology is also about understanding where objects were found and how groups of finds functioned together. Distribution patterns can help reconstruct activities within buildings and suggest how work, storage, production, and daily routines were organized. It also includes Assyrian-period burials and later Islamic-period material, showing the site's long history.
The second part of Volume V brings natural-science methods directly into the archaeological interpretation. Radiometric dating contributes to chronology. Studies of animal and fish remains, molluscs, and botanical material offer evidence for diet, agriculture, environment, trade, and the use of local and non-local resources. A soil-flotation project recovers small botanical remains that might otherwise disappear from the archaeological record. These studies show how modern archaeology depends on collaboration between excavators and natural-science specialists.
One striking example is the paleomagnetic study of tilted walls in Area C, Stratum V. Instead of treating damaged architecture only as a descriptive feature, the researchers used physical evidence to investigate seismic destruction. This demonstrates a central strength of Volume V: interpretation is built by combining objects, context, chronology, biological remains, geology, and physical-science methods.
Our discussion with Professor Mazar therefore uses Volume V to ask a larger question: how do small finds and scientific analyses change the historical picture created by excavation? The volume shows that understanding an ancient city requires more than identifying buildings or connecting archaeological horizons with historical narratives. It requires reconstructing technologies, food systems, craft production, movement of goods, environmental conditions, patterns of use within buildings, and the events that transformed them.
Željko Stanojević is a host with the New Books Network and President of the Institute for Hebrew Language and Literature, Belgrade. He is also Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the European Hebrew Journal, an international Diamond Open Access journal supporting research in Hebrew, biblical, Jewish, linguistic, historical, and related studies. He also coordinates the European Hebrew Journal International Online Conference, New Discoveries and New Directions in Biblical, Hebrew, and Theological Studies. Authors of recent academic books are welcome to contact him regarding possible New Books Network interviews.
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Gregorio Astengo and Davide Spina eds.,"Real Estate: Histories of Architecture and Capital" (gta Verlag, 2026)
Real Estate: Histories of Architecture and Capital (gta Verlag, 2026)challenges the conventional assumption that architects and planners are the principal authors of urban form. It instead foregrounds the …
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Real Estate: Histories of Architecture and Capital (gta Verlag, 2026)challenges the conventional assumption that architects and planners are the principal authors of urban form. It instead foregrounds the developers, builders, financiers, and media strategists whose pursuit of profit has shaped cities, particularly under global capitalism. Bringing together studies spanning the eighteenth century to the present, the editors, Gregorio Astengo and Davide Spina, and the contributors establish real estate development as a significant field of inquiry within architectural history. It also proposes new methods and sources for understanding how speculation and market mechanisms have produced the built environment.
This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Manchester. He researches nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (gta Verlag, 2023).
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Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys eds., "Media Matters in Landscape Architecture" (Applied Research & Design, 2025)
Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists …
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Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (Applied Research & Design, 2025) goes behind the scenes to consider how media technologies that have emerged in recent decades are shaping the practices of artists, designers, engineers, and scientists. The media infrastructure of climate science and Earth remote sensing, coupled with the increased availability of spatial information and modeling software, provides the context for many of the chapters in that the media and methods employed are designed to capture phenomena that are not directly visible to human perception, and where there is a high degree of uncertainty or changeability due to dynamic material conditions. Co-editors Karen M'Closkey and Keith VanDerSys bring together authors from a wide range of disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and architecture—to examine how the creation and use of data, images, and models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of “environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the specific material and social environments within which they operate.
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Lauren Stara, "Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a book designed for librarians, trustees, local government officials, architects, and interior designers who are …
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Planning Library Spaces: A Practical Guide for Library Building Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a book designed for librarians, trustees, local government officials, architects, and interior designers who are designing or planning to build, renovate, or reconfigure library spaces. Most librarians embark upon a library building project with little experience in space planning, architecture, or construction. Written by a registered architect and professional librarian, this is a guidebook for librarians embarking on a library building project. It includes a brief history of library facilities, placing them in the context of public buildings. An introduction to library planning principles and a discussion of library design concepts and trends are presented, including the impact of the 2020 pandemic on library design. Sections on working with architects, building design/construction terminology and the basics of reading architectural drawings provide insight into unfamiliar jargon and visual communication. Extensive illustrations and photographs show examples of library layouts and furniture and equipment, and the final chapter addresses the challenges inherent in a major building project. As library services change, buildings must adapt to accommodate and provide these new innovations. Buildings are living things, and this book will offer guidance to those embarking on a project of any scale or size.
Guest: Lauren Stara is a registered architect and a librarian, specializing in library building design. Her past library experience includes everything from front desk clerk to director. As a Library Building Specialist for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, Lauren administers grant funds and provides technical assistance and advice from initial planning through construction of public library projects. She writes, consults, and speaks on library design, service design, and future trends in libraries and is coauthor of Responding to Rapid Change in Libraries: A User Experience Approach (2020).
Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
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William Whyte, "The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood" (Harvard UP, 2026)
We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to …
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We often idealize the university as a sanctuary for disinterested reason, where material concerns are set aside in favor of higher principles. Yet when we remember our own college experiences, what springs to mind are not just lofty concepts but also material realities: cramped dorm rooms and musty library stacks, gothic towers and freshly mowed quads.
The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood (Harvard University Press, 2026) puts such seemingly inconsequential details at the center of the institution’s 900-year history. Constructing each chapter around an emblematic material—straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete—Professor William Whyte traces the intimate connections between the university’s shifting physical form and its evolving social and cultural meanings. From the medieval University of Paris, where students purchased bundles of straw to use as chairs in otherwise-unfurnished classrooms, to the ocean of concrete at postcolonial Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, Professor Whyte shows how competing visions of higher learning left their imprint on generations of university architecture, landscaping, and furniture. Along the way, he highlights perennial fears that, within the social space of the university, the life of the mind would recede before worldly interests: that student bloodlines would be tainted by racial intermixing, that courting donors with buildings named in their honor would become more important than research and education, that the allure of powdered wigs and silk gowns would undermine scholarly discipline.
A richly textured chronicle, The University concludes that, even in the age of remote learning, the college campus is irreplaceable. The future of higher education includes fiber-optic cables, but stone, brick, and steel are here to stay.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Marco Pompili, "Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On" (Brill, 2026)
Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr …
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Public Housing in Japan: The Dōjunkai Apartments One Hundred Years On (Brill, 2026) is the first comprehensive English-language examination of the Dōjunkai Foundation (1924-2024). Compiled and edited by Dr. Marco Pompili through interviews and studies, it is a must-read for anyone interested in modern Japanese architecture. The Dōjunkai Apartments (1924-1934), the Foundation's best-known work, introduced apartment living to Japan in response to crucial historical and social challenges such as urban reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1923 and the emergence of new working and middle classes. The book's texts, by prominent scholars and architects, as well as a series of original drawings and photographs from the period, bring the work of the Dōjunkai Foundation back to life 100 years after its founding. While the Dōjunkai Apartments have unfortunately been lost in the rapid changes and greedy redevelopment typical of Japanese metropolises, this book seeks to contribute to the preservation of their memory and their significance.
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Stefan Al, "Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home" (Norton, 2026)
A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves. Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds …
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A sweeping history of humanity’s most fundamental creation―the home―and its effects on the land, cities, and people themselves.
Americans spend, on average, 90 percent of their lives indoors, with two-thirds of that time spent in their homes. Globally, the construction and maintenance of residential buildings account for a staggering portion of carbon emissions. In this timely and fascinating work, architect and urban-planning scholar Stefan Al deftly weaves together archaeology, engineering, social history, and environmental science to explain how our homes have developed through the ages and in turn shaped civilization and the planet itself.
From tiny pit-houses in the Levant and Mesoamerica thousands of years ago to soaring skyscrapers in Dubai, New York, and Shanghai today, Dwelling on Earth: The Past and Future of the Places We Call Home (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) takes readers on a swift and absorbing tour of the evolution of human habitation. Whisking readers from ancient Pompeii to contemporary Hong Kong, industrial-age Liverpool to postwar Levittown, Al shows how our choices in housing have both reflected and affected ideas about gender roles, privacy, and comfort. Discover how seemingly mundane elements―like door-knockers and corridors―have altered everyday interactions, and how material choices have remade the planet’s surface. He also confronts the darker side of domesticity, exposing the unintended consequences of our architectural choices across millennia, including smoke-filled Neolithic dwellings, deadly fires in crowded Roman apartment buildings, and worsening social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. Finally, he examines the myths and reality of future housing, including 3D-printed homes and space architecture built by robots.
Drawing from personal experiences across global cities and professional insights, Al illuminates how our choices in housing continue to influence everything from social relationships to climate change, ultimately arguing that understanding this rich history is crucial for building a more sustainable future. With billions more people needing housing in the coming decades, Dwelling on Earth reveals how we might transform humanity’s defining challenge into our greatest opportunity.
HOST BIO: Alex Hallbom is an urban planner and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
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Brent Elliott and Roger Bowdler, "The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture" (Historic England, 2026)
Roger Bowdler and Brent Elliott’s The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture, published by Historic England (2026), traces the history of the cemetery from the 17th century to the present day. The …
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Roger Bowdler and Brent Elliott’s The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture, published by Historic England (2026), traces the history of the cemetery from the 17th century to the present day. The cemetery emerged as a new landscape form in the 19th century in Britain but had deep roots in earlier churchyard practices and in fashionable garden landscape design. Cemeteries very quickly became a locus for the monumental expression of loss, family identity and social standing. The book offers a clear chronological narrative, with alternate chapters attending to landscape and monuments. The authors present unfamiliar primary data and introduce some welcome new themes including reference to the monumental mason industry and cemetery infrastructure. The authors draw examples from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and in doing so underline the very particular nature of Scottish funerary heritage. The book’s principal strength is its collection of illustrations that include historic and contemporary photographs, landscape design maps and postcards. The text brings the narrative completely up to date, with reference to the natural burial movement and landscapes designed to meet Muslim burial need. This text is now very probably the best introduction to the material culture of the British cemetery, written by experts with over 70 years’ experience in cemetery research and conservation. This interview, conducted by Julie Rugg of the University of York’s Cemetery Research Group, is a meeting of enthusiasts for a landscape form that is moving and thought-provoking in equal measure.
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Elizabeth Darling, "Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–32" (Lund Humphries, 2026)
Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s …
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Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Dr. Darling asks how the immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.
The book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s history.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Vaneesa Cook, "Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks" (Beacon Press, 2026)
In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to …
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In Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmarks (Beacon Press, 2026), historian Dr. Vaneesa Cook examines the history of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty in order to consider, more broadly, the United States' relationship with liberty and empire. Empire and liberty have been part of the American story since the founding, but they are often at odds, sometimes irreconcilably so. Cook examines their changing relationship and meaning using these two iconic buildings as anchors. She also examines the symbolism and importance of the landmarks themselves. She considers how individuals and groups who have had more limited access to liberty have tried to shape the meaning of the symbols and their own rights at the same time. In telling this sweeping history, Cook touches in themes of American identity and ideals.
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Mark Crinson, "Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026)
Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the …
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Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape (Paul Mellon Centre, 2026) by Professor Mark Crinson is the first critical study to examine how a major international airport takes shape on the ground, and what that means for the landscape around it. Focused on Heathrow airport, it traces how the area has been formed and reformed by overlapping systems of architecture, infrastructure and enclosure, from the common land of Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century to the global transport hub of the present day.
The book explores the different forces that have shaped the airport’s environment: the remaking of landforms, the design of terminal buildings, and the surrounding sprawl of hotels, schools, factories, and business parks. At the same time, it shows how the Heathrow area has been moulded by wider shifts in energy, mobility, and the economy, and how the airport has in turn left a lasting mark on its surroundings, both materially and ecologically.
Drawing on previously unpublished material, Aviationland includes close studies of key sites, as well as figures who shaped how we see the airport today, including Richard Rogers, Patrick Abercrombie, and J. G. Ballard. Bringing together architectural, landscape, and infrastructural histories that are seldom read in tandem, this volume makes the case for Heathrow as a distinctively modern landscape. The result is a nuanced account of how local places become entangled within global systems, and what happens when they do.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Dmytro Soloviov, "Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine" (Fuel, 2025)
Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several …
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Ukraine’s modernist buildings are an extraordinary blend of function, avant-garde aesthetics and ingenious design, but despite these qualities, they remain largely unrecognized. This is a result of several factors, including the stigma of belonging to the Soviet era, corruption, neglect, as well as the ongoing threat of destruction from both unscrupulous developers and war. Photographer Dmytro Soloviov has crossed Ukraine documenting them to form the most comprehensive publication available on the subject.
With an introduction by renowned architecture critic Owen Hatherley, complete with historical images, Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine (Fuel, 2025) cements these buildings in a cultural and political context.
Dmytro Soloviov is a photographer, tour guide, and activist, and the creator of the popular Ukrainian Modernism Instagram page. He frequently leads tours of modernist architecture in different cities in Ukraine.
Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar focused on Ukrainian history, culture, and politics. She is the author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023).
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Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth …
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Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism, leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early postcolonial eras (1828-1963). It examines the resistance that challenges this ordering, rendering monuments unruly and unassimilable despite state efforts to control their narrative. This exposes the nation's contradictory claims of inclusivity while marginalizing subaltern groups. It guides readers through picturesque landscapes, museums, imperial displays, postcards, travel experiences, Partition refugee camps, and cinema. Analyzing these forms reveals how the archive of Indo-Islamic monuments was shaped through presences and absences. Each chapter examines everyday life, untangles knowable public transcripts, illuminates strategic excisions and hidden transcripts, juxtaposes evidence that has not yet been analyzed in conjunction, reads archival material against the grain, and finds archival layers in unfamiliar places.
NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar
Sohini teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University.
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Gareth Doherty, "Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design" (U Virginia Press, 2025)
Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social …
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Landscape architecture is at a crossroads. The ability to draw upon interdisciplinary perspectives and generate insights from the combined vantage points of design, environmental studies, and the social sciences puts it in a prime position to address the most pressing issues of our time, such as climate change and social inequality. Its current reliance on digital and technological solutions, however, has increasingly caused landscape architects to lose sight of the ways in which humans actually use spaces. And while landscapes are designed all over the world, the discipline remains inordinately centered on the Global North. Dr. Gareth Doherty's Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025) alters that long-standing paradigm through real-life examples that provide tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional, diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use them.
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Tania Sengupta and Stuart King eds., "Reclaiming Colonial Architecture" (Routledge, 2024)
Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (Routledge, 2024) explores the built inheritance of colonialism and considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities, and activists might narrate, care …
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Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (Routledge, 2024) explores the built inheritance of colonialism and considers how architects, heritage practitioners, students, communities, and activists might narrate, care for, transform, or challenge them today. Awarded the SAHGB’s Colvin Medal in 2025, the book draws on a variety of authors to combine historical context with thematically organised case studies across urban and architectural scales.
This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).
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Joshua Comaroff, "Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money …
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In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore (U Minnesota Press, 2025) explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm. Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estate development sites to offering money and commodities to the dead as a hedge against precarious real-world transactions—Joshua Comaroff shows how speculative finance, largely governed by chance and volatility, is understood via its inherently spectral qualities. Based on detailed case studies and years of extensive fieldwork, Spectropolis argues for the power of popular belief systems to theorize contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to give form to collective affect as well as shared aspirations and anxieties, often in deeply hopeful, horizontal and empowering ways.
Joshua Comaroff is the assistant professor of architecture at the National University of Singapore. He is coauthor of Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition (Minnesota, 2024).
Alyssa Kee recently finished graduate studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests lie in urban geography, multispecies ecologies, and urban food assemblages. She is currently in the field of Geographical Education.
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Sierra Bainbridge and James Kitchin, "Seeking Abundance: Design, Ecology and a Flourishing Planet" (Axio, 2026)
Regenerative design is a way of building that heals our planet and our communities by halting biodiversity loss, reversing climate change, and improving social equity. Over the last decade, the nonprofit design …
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Regenerative design is a way of building that heals our planet and our communities by halting biodiversity loss, reversing climate change, and improving social equity. Over the last decade, the nonprofit design practice MASS has proven that we can yield positive social, environmental, and economic results through a series of projects in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Seeking Abundance: Design, Ecology and a Flourishing Planet (Axio, 2026) argues for reducing the harm our building activities wage in our environments and that we can—and must—help people and the planet thrive together. The proof? MASS's projects represent a coherent and replicable philosophy that responds to local ecologies and transforms lives. This groundbreaking new book, co-edited by Sierra Bainbridge and Alan Ricks, examines how the power of multidisciplinary collaboration, regenerative practices, and community engagement can actively contribute to a healthier, more harmonious world.
The evidence of these works can be found in three case studies, focusing on The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, and The Ilima Primary School.
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Charlie Qiuli Xue and Arwen Yingting Chen, "American-Designed Shopping Malls in China" (Hong Kong UP, 2026)
China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this …
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China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts.
American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China’s rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China’s profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China’s rapid urban development.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Judith Hill, "Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland" (Four Courts Press, 2026)
Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association with Britain, challenged the status of Irish landed proprietors …
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Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association with Britain, challenged the status of Irish landed proprietors, and not a few responded by building castles. In Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2026) Dr. Judith Hill explores the projects of two Irish proprietors: the Burys, later Lord and Lady Charleville, who commissioned Francis Johnston, then Ireland’s most important architect, to design Charleville Castle; and Lawrence Parsons, later 2nd Earl of Rosse, who reimagined seventeenth-century Parsonstown House as early nineteenth-century Birr Castle.
Architecturally the castles belong to Georgian Gothic, a style that in Britain is overshadowed by later nineteenth-century Gothic and is largely overlooked in Ireland. In this fascinating new book, Dr. Hill investigates Georgian Gothic in its own terms as both a British and Irish phenomenon, demonstrating how antiquarian understanding, associative thinking, awareness of family pedigree and historicised design ideas resulted in a uniquely Irish response to the Gothic revival.
Using the ample surviving archives related to both families, she argues that these architecturally original and significant castles eloquently expressed their builders’ political and social concerns, making them artefacts of cultural unionism.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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