In latest A is for Architecture Podcast episode Cristian Frost, architect, professor and Head of Research at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, about his 2025 book, Architecture and Cultural Continuity: The Making of Festival, Experience and Historicity, and published by Bloomsbury.
In our discussion, we approach Christian’s argument that architecture is part of culture, not an expression of it, and that it should be understood as lived experience rather than as form. To recover depth lost in modernism’s architecture, festival – public, civic, ritual and communal – offers deployable insight. Both festival and architecture are experiential, but through festivals cultural languages, values and meaning are materialized.
Staring with Florence’s Feast of San Giovanni, Christian moves the same analysis onto buildings, arguing that good architecture - like festival - resists co-option, survives ignorance, holds several meanings at once, and is activated by its “ethical core” rather than formal beauty.
The wider implications of this argument are political: where technological modernity has produced a “tacit” or “aesthetic” colonisation through globalised modernism, recovering the ontological experience of architecture offers a pathway towards cultural decolonisation.
Christian can be found at work and on LinkedIn. The book is linked above.
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Image credit: © Christian Frost.
Music credits: Bruno Gillick