New Books in Architecture

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

Episodes

Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)

November 30, 2025 • 56 mins

The dream of the modern worker’s house emerged in early twentieth-century America as wage earners gained access to new, larger, and better-equipped dwellings. Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit (Temple UP, 2023) is a cogent history of the houses those workers dreamed of and labored for. Dr. Michael McCulloch chronicles the efforts of employers, government agencies, and the building...

Mark as Played

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)

November 26, 2025 • 39 mins

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 support of a wide range of arguments about modern architecture, but never has he attracted a comprehensive and critical treatment from the viewpoint of architect...

Mark as Played

Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)

November 23, 2025 • 39 mins

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 Africa to the factories and shipyards of the UK – and tells the story of the activists and workers who took on a once indomitable industry. Illegal for the p...

Mark as Played

John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

November 17, 2025 • 56 mins

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 might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses—they were hubs of life, activity, and i...

Mark as Played

Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)

October 31, 2025 • 58 mins

After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis...

Mark as Played

Pablo Meninato and Gregory Marinic, "Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America" (Routledge, 2025)

October 31, 2025 • 77 mins

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in...

Mark as Played

Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Barrack, 1572-1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture" (Park Books, 2024)

October 30, 2025 • 52 mins

The Barrack, 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture (Park Books, 2024) tells the little-known history of a building type that many people used to register as an alien interloper in conventionally built-up areas. The barrack is a mostly lightweight construction, a hybrid between shack, tent, and traditional building. It is a highly efficient structure that sometimes also proves to be extremely durable. Easy to...

Mark as Played

Cosima Clara Gillhammer, "Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

October 30, 2025 • 72 mins

With implications for the history of religion and art alike, an exploration of the lasting influence of Christian liturgy across a range of media. Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy (Reaktion Books, 2025) offers a captivating journey through the history of religious rituals in Western Europe, showcasing the profound impact of Christian liturgy on art, literature, music, and architecture. Through ten evocative stori...

Mark as Played

Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)

October 28, 2025 • 56 mins

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading moder...

Mark as Played

Emily Gee, "Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

October 15, 2025 • 49 mins

Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman (Liverpool University Press, 2025) by Emily Gee is the first comprehensive study of the campaigns to house a new generation of working women, the specialised design of the buildings and the women whose lives were changed by this architectural movement. After 1900, the rapid rise of women working as clerks, secretaries or typists, in London and other...

Mark as Played

Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication" (MIT Press, 2025)

October 5, 2025 • 37 mins

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossr...

Mark as Played

Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)

September 26, 2025 • 34 mins

By the end of the twentieth century, US architecture and engineering firms held more capital than entire countries, employed more people than were housed in most cities, and rented offices in more nations than comprised the UN. Within them, architects were designing not single buildings but urban systems, including the multinational infrastructures, legal codes, and financial mechanisms on which those systems came to depend. Howeve...

Mark as Played

Olga Touloumi, "Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

August 30, 2025 • 58 mins

For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creatio...

Mark as Played

Harald Bodenschatz et al., "Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945" (DOM, 2025)

August 26, 2025 • 56 mins

Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945 (DOM, 2025) is edited by Uwe Altrock, Harald Bodenschatz, Victoria Grau, Jannik Noeske, Christiane Post, and Max Welch Guerra. The book includes contributions from Christian von Oppen, Piero Sassi, and Jannik Noeske. Two co-editors, Victoria Grau and Max Welch Guerra, join the New Books Network to discuss this work. In this book, urban pla...

Mark as Played

Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)

August 20, 2025 • 48 mins

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in B...

Mark as Played

Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)

August 13, 2025 • 63 mins

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity. Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity...

Mark as Played

Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)

August 7, 2025 • 68 mins

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo’s urban modernity using film...

Mark as Played

Ünver Rüstem, "Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul" (Princeton UP, 2019)

July 27, 2025 • 72 mins

In Istanbul, there is a mosque on every hill. Cruising along the Bosphorus, either for pleasure, or like the majority of Istanbul’s denizens, for transit, you cannot help but notice that the city’s landscape would be dramatically altered without the mosques of the city. In Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton University Press, 2019), Ünver Rüstem takes a stab of a slice of that h...

Mark as Played

Allan Doig, "A History of the Church through its Buildings" (Oxford UP, 2021)

July 19, 2025 • 37 mins

A History of the Church through its Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Allan Doig takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to c...

Mark as Played

Jake Kaner and Clive Edwards, "Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture" (Routledge, 2024)

July 18, 2025 • 46 mins

Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture (Routledge, 2024) provides comprehensive and accessible coverage of the materials and techniques that are encountered in furniture of this century. After putting the design, manufacture and conservation of twentieth-century furniture into context, the volume then offers an A-Z of materials organised into 12 chapters. Within each chapter a wide variety of material types are discussed, obs...

Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

Are You A Charlotte?

In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.

Stuff You Should Know

If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.

Crime Junkie

Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.

Advertise With Us

New Books in Architecture

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)

Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)

John Goodall, "The Castle: A History" (Yale UP, 2022)

Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)

Pablo Meninato and Gregory Marinic, "Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America" (Routledge, 2025)

Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Barrack, 1572-1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture" (Park Books, 2024)

Cosima Clara Gillhammer, "Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy" (Reaktion Books, 2025)

Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Emily Gee, "Hostel, House and Chambers: Accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian Working Woman" (Liverpool UP, 2025)

Carlotta Daro, "The Architecture of the Wire: Infrastructures of Telecommunication" (MIT Press, 2025)

Aaron Cayer, "Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire" (U California Press, 2025)

Olga Touloumi, "Assembly by Design: The United Nations and Its Global Interior" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Harald Bodenschatz et al., "Urban Planning in Nazi Germany: Attack, Triumph, Terror in the European Context, 1933–1945" (DOM, 2025)

Bench Ansfield, "Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City" (Norton, 2025)

Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia" (Yale UP, 2025)

Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real" (American U in Cairo Press, 2022)

Ünver Rüstem, "Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul" (Princeton UP, 2019)

Allan Doig, "A History of the Church through its Buildings" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Jake Kaner and Clive Edwards, "Conservation of Twentieth-Century Furniture" (Routledge, 2024)

Popular Podcasts

Michael McCulloch, "Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit" (Temple UP, 2023)

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)