How do you design a roller coaster? What was it like on the North Sea oil rigs in the 1980s? What did you learn in the steel yards? Hanif Kara, recipient of this year’s Soane Medal led the engineering on the Peckham Library by Will Alsop, the Phaeno Science Centre by Zaha Hadid Architects amongst many others, Tim though is interested in where Hanif came from as much as where he got to.

Few architecture critics have had the impact of Kenneth Frampton. His Modern Architecture: a Critical History is a masterpiece; his essay on Critical Regionalism, one of the most influential pieces of writing on architecture of the twentieth century. He talks to Tim about his latest collection of essays Architecture and the Public World, published by Bloomsbury.

Kengo Kuma is a mercurial architect, who works with natural forms and historical structures with an avant-garde sensibility. Tim talks to the usually taciturn Japanese maestro about the horrors of Metabolism, what he calls the philosophy of the detail and the affinities between Portugal and Japan.

Job Floris was an editor of the pioneering, always interesting OASE Journal for Architecture from 2008 until 2018. He is also an architect: one half of the Rotterdam-based practice Monadnock which he founded in the naughties with Sandor Naus. For reasons that Tim explores with Job, Monadnock’s work sits uneasily in their home city although it is popular elsewhere in the Netherlands and in Germany.

Simon Henley is one of London architecture’s unsung heroes. His practice Henley Halebrown wrings great buildings from unlikely sites across the city, Hackney New Primary School being a great example but also their latest work Thames Christian School. But Simon is also a great advocate for the culture of architecture as a writer but in a host of other ways. Tim talked to him about buildings, history and London.