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.

Tim talks to Selina Anttinen, founding partner of Anttinen Oiva Architects with her husband Vesa Oiva. So successful have the practice been in their native Helsinki, from designing the main library of the University of Helsinki in 2008 to leading the reimagining of the city’s central harbour with the Katoleina Pier project, finished this year, you may not have heard of them. Until now.

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.

Paul Robbrecht founded Robbrecht en Daem with his wife Hilde Daem in 1975. Their son Johannes joined in 2002. This family-led practice is one of the most important in Europe, helping transform Belgium into one of the richest architectural cultures in the world. He talks to Tim about his father, his favourite sculptor and Egypt.

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.

To celebrate the London Festival of Architecture’s 20th anniversary Tim met Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times architecture critic, in a small podcast booth built underneath the Lloyd’s building in London. Designed by Urban Radicals, the booth was the perfect place to talk about public space in London and Eddy’s book, On the Street: In-Between Architecture published by HENI.

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.

Bijoy Jain lives in Mumbai; the city of his birth. Tim talked to him about his world famous practice Studio Mumbai which sits between the world of art, craft and architecture and is staffed by skilled craftsmen, technicians and draughtsmen, who design and build each project themselves. He reflects on architecture as dance and his time living and working in London.