Podcasts

On our fifth episode of Action Now, the podcast series by Students for Climate Action from the Sheffield School of Architecture (SSoA), we talk with Howard Evans a lecturer and head of the duel Architecture and Landscape programmes at the SSoA, and co-founder of Chile, Evans +Care Architects, who were recently longlisted for RIBA House of the year with Ravine House. 

The conversation covers topics on Architectural education, particularly looking at sustainable architecture, and low embodied carbon. This leads into Howard's practice experience with designing Ravine house, as well as numerous other sustainable projects. We end the conversation by discussing the importance of education and learning for not just students, but for clients, and practicing architects.

For the fourth episode in our podcast series, we talk to Mark Parsons, sustainable pioneer from Studio Polpo- a social enterprise based in Sheffield. They bring together unexpected disciplines, marginal communities, artists and funding to tackle important contemporary issues, while having fun.

Their studio designs flexible/mobile/changeable architecture and implements innovative use of materials, all whilst developing these ideas in practice. They investigate, analyse and collate information for dissemination to facilitate a positive change.

Their design of "the Heeley mushroom project" uses mycelium, which is the vegetative part of the mushroom, to explore a low-carbon construction method in architecture. With the help of children from a local school, the Studio prompted sustainability through nature, building and architecture.

For the third episode in our podcast series, we talk to Sonakshi Pandit, Part 1 graduate and winner of the 2020 RIBA Award for Sustainable Design. Sonakshi attended the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA).

Her project, Urban Ca(r)talyser, speculates on the future of retail parks in the context of online shopping. Sonakshi gives obsolete shopping carts new life by transforming them into Gabion carts filled with rubble coming from the site and other demolition works. These gabion carts become structural walls that grow and contract in response to construction and demolition works across the city, demonstrating how repair, reuse, and up-cycling can provide ways to de-grow the built environment, replacing current extractive imperatives with circular modes of exchange.

Through academia and her volunteering work with under-resourced communities in Bangalore, Sonakshi has developed an awareness of architects and designers' social responsibility and the potential of architecture to transform and activate social and ecological systems.

In our second episode, we’re going to delve a bit deeper and explore how our most fundamental attitudes towards design need to shift in order to reach a more sustainable future. 

We’ve invited Scott McAuley, who is the coordinator of the Anthropocene Architecture School ⁠@anthropocene.a.s⁠, as well as helping coordinate the climate literacy group of ⁠@architectscan⁠. 

In the the talk, we discuss how they promote an “evidence over image” attitude towards design in their activities. By “evidence over image”, we mean judging the success of a building by how it performs, not just what it looks like.

On the first episode of Action Now, the podcast series by Students for Climate Action from the Sheffield School of Architecture, we talk with Fionn Stevenson, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. With a passion for the environment, she started off at Cambridge University, before becoming an activist for anti-nuclear, peace, and environmental activism while working in practice. She completed her studies at the University of Sheffield, and pursued teaching in several different architecture schools.

We discuss themes of activism, sustainability, and how practice and schools need to consider environmental, social, and economic priorities.