Takero Shimazaki is director of the London-based practice t–sa, which he co-founded with Yuli Toh in 1996.You can’t control everything as an architect. You can’t dictate everything – that’s not the point. Instead it’s quite exciting to be liberating, to let things be in a way. There are discrepancies between the ideal architecture of imagination and the reality of tolerance and conflict; in these kinds of chaotic and raw situations, how does architecture survive?Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“The artist working alone in their studio is the antithesis of what we do every day as architects […] and yet one hopes that the work you produce might have the same resonance.”Jamie Fobert a Canadian-born architect who has found himself increasingly working on projects at the centre of British culture. Fobert, who has recently become chair of the Architecture Foundation's board of trustees, studied at the University of Toronto before moving to London in 1988, where he worked for for David Chipperfield, before establishing his own practice in 1996. He is best known for his work with major fashion brands and cultural institutions, and has designed retail spaces for Selfridges, Versace and Givenchy, as well as major extensions and alterations to galleries and museums including Tate St Ives, Kettles Yard in Cambridge, and most recently London’s National Portrait Gallery. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholas Lobo Brennan and Astrid Smitham founded Apparata, their London-based architecture practice, in 2014."What we are always trying to do is a kind of activism, but the activism is entirely expressed and developed through prosaic things – literally, where is the door, how wide is the walkway, that kind of stuff.It’s not either or – either architecture is its own autonomous discipline, or it’s a social practice – there has to be room for the idea that the actual devices you use to engage with activist work can literally be construction, space and architecture."Buy tickets to Architecture on Stage: A public housing manifesto (This Friday 26 January at the Barbican Centre)Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. This episode features Part 2 of his interview for Scaffold. (Listen to part 1 here). "There is a different kind of time in the studio of artists […] time almost gets suspended when I do a studio visit, which is a major aspect of how I break with routine and liberate time. Artists are world builders, and so you travel into another world." – HUOScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator and Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. "We need protected spaces for art, yes – that's why we have museums – but we need also to find ways to actually go from from the gallery space to the park, into the city, and into society…curating is about building bridges between art and society, and I’ve always believed we need to create this kind of experience for people”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rural Urban Framework is a research and design collaborative based at the University of Hong Kong, directed by Joshua Bolchover and John Lin. Conducted as a non-profit organization designing for charities and NGOs working in China, RUF has built over 15 projects in various villages in China including schools, community centers, hospitals, village houses, bridges, and incremental planning strategies. Of course, much has changed in China since John and Joshua began their practice - the rural to urban migration emblematic of china’s development over the past several decades is now reversing following changes in government policy as well as massive economic and cultural shifts, which has caused Joshua and John to adapt and reorient their practice in different directions. While they still co-direct Rural Urban Framework, Josh is also director of the District Development Unit, which focuses on the growth of developing regions in Mongolia, Nepal and the Philippines, while John has established a postgraduate program at HKU called the Building Society that implements experimental building practices in traditional contexts. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tosin Oshinowo is a Lagos-based architect and curator of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Titled "The beauty of Impermanence, an Architecture of Adaptability," this year’s triennial considers design solutions built from conditions of scarcity and explores how this might impact sustainable design today. This interview was recorded in Sharjah during the opening weekend of the Triennial in mid November 2023, and the conversation began by addressing the triennial itself, before unfolding into a more personal discussion of the contradictions that emerge between the exhibition and Oshinowo's practice.---Book tickets for upcoming Architecture on Stage lectures by Duncan Lewis (Tuesday November 21st) and Sam Chermayeff with Jack Self (Wednesday November 29th). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

RESOLVE is the Croydon-based collective practice of Akil Scafe-Smith, Seth Scafe-Smith and Melissa Haniff. “We want people to look at our work and think: “I could do that” - if it means it doesn’t look amazing, and it can’t go on dezeen, so be it. There has to the mark of people on these structures, and the mistakes of people too. That is a fundamental part of our work.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scaffold is on holiday this week – instead here's an interview with the IG architecture meme account Dank Lloyd Wright recorded last year for the podcast Power and Public Space, co-produced by Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation. A new Scaffold interview with Resolve Collective will air in two weeks ✌️ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Theo de Meyer is an architect based in Ghent. His work moves between architecture, design and the arts, often reconciling the various disciplines. He and doorzon interieur architecten together represent the core of the modular collective Stand Van Zaken (‘State of Affairs’), who create furniture and architecture in collaboration with specialists in various fields. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew BlunderfieldDownload the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tony Fretton founded his eponymous architecture practice in 1982. His early work in London, including the Lisson Gallery (1986-1992), was influential in defining a new approach to architecture focused on urban context and daily life.“By the time I graduated, London was completely different. It wasn’t opulent, it was poor, and punk was an attitude that accepted the nihilism of the state and of the city. All those songs by the Sex Pistols, they rang true, they weren’t just inventions. Punk was really important to me - punks were ethical, they had an idea of the world and it was about make and mend, about living in the margins, and that was the background from which I developed my practice.” – TFScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew BlunderfieldDownload the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tony Fretton founded his eponymous architecture practice in 1982. His early work in London, including the Lisson Gallery (1986-1992), was influential in defining a new approach to architecture focused on urban context and daily life. “By the time I graduated, London was completely different. It wasn’t opulent, it was poor, and punk was an attitude that accepted the nihilism of the state and of the city. All those songs by the Sex Pistols, they rang true, they weren’t just inventions. Punk was really important to me - punks were ethical, they had an idea of the world and it was about make and mend, about living in the margins, and that was the background from which I developed my practice.” – TFScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Luke Jones and George Gingell are hosts of the podcast About Buildings and Cities. "We’re interested in getting into things that are obscure [in architectural history], but we’re also interested in looking at things that are super obvious. […] Taking Gaudi for example, he’s the world’s favourite architect, and he’s also curiously elusive and totally unfashionable - like kitch embarrassing tea-towel stuff. At the same time, he is such a strange and virtuosic designer. We’re interested in trying to make sense of that thing that seems so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to talk about." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology at Kings College London, and the son of the celebrated painter Frank Bowling, whose studio he now manages."Frank always wanted children, but did not want to be a father, because of his own father’s violence; by being an absent father through my infancy and childhood, Frank allowed me to re-write the script of fatherhood."One thing that is joyous about working in the studio is being able to involve my son, who’s now in his 30’s, and his son, who’s two and a half. The fact that we now have four generations of male Bowlings in the studio, coming together around the work, is a source of joy. It’s almost like we disrupted this old pattern of what fatherhood should be."Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Asli Çiçek is an Architect and writer based in Brussels, whose work focuses on scenography and exhibition design. "Culture is not a luxury. I don’t like populistic discussions about what culture should be or how history should be flattened to a quick communication. I think it’s fantastic to not understand everything at once, to keep the fascination for history and culture alive in museums […] "There is no shame in having culture. If there’s a debate I silently follow, it’s that there is a necessity for culture in society – not only as an egalitarian concept, but as an educational concept. That is something I try to stand for."Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte Cooper is the author of Poundbury: a Queer Tour of Monarchy, published earlier this year by 33 Editions. "One of my bugbears about Poundbury is that it’s not an honest place – it’s pretending to be something that it isn’t. They talk about how green it is, how it is invested in traditional building techniques, but it’s also breeze blocks, it’s plastic, it’s a great place to park your car […] My question is, if you could, what would bring the truth our of Poundbury, what would show it for what it is?"Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robin Winogrond is a Landscape Architect based in Zurich."I try to never look at what I expect to see, but to see in a raw way, in an uninformed way, I try to read space and atmospheres in the most unschooled way I can, to soak up as much knowledge as I can." – RWScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Karin Templin is an architect, educator, and author of the book At Home in London: The Mansion Block, co-published by The Architecture Foundation and MACK. This book is first in a series on types of London housing, reflecting on the place of the home in the city in the light of its longstanding housing crisis. To find out more visit mackbooks.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode originally aired in April 2022. Lesley Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute and curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.“I don’t see myself as being ‘the future’, but the expanded field [of architecture] that I’ve operated in for most of my life has given me something that is of use to he generation coming behind me, so that no matter how I end up making my living, I see myself first and foremost as a teacher.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. For more information visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sumayya Vally is a Musilm South African architect, and founder of the practice Counterspace. “Architecture is abstract, and I think what I’m doing in my practice is making a concerted effort to find different sources for the origins of that abstraction. I think what has happened in the cannon and in the profession more broadly is that we’ve inherited so much that we don’t deeply question…I think the languages that we’ve inherited could do with being supplemented or oven being overtaken, dare I say, by other origins, that come from different ways of being and different value systems.”– SVScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. His book, The Architecture of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” The Architecture of Disability offers a critical perspective on histories and futures of buildings, cities, and landscapes — beyond a sole focus on the problems of accessibility.Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

b+ is a collaborative architecture practice that operates across different media and formats. The practice seeks to engage with challenges of eco-social transformation and adaptive reuse, and to contribute to the societal transformation with ecologically and economically viable answers.“Why does the political right have better propaganda than the left? It’s perhaps because the right is situated in the 'no' – the 'yes' is much more difficult to propagandise. It’s therefore necessary to find positive claims that can be engaged with almost instantaneously – in a way, that’s the architectural project”  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Julian Opie is an artist based in London. We create models to deal with the world and to function in the world. It’s how we perceive the world and our own life and existence, drawing from the world a language that can then be shared and used to talk about existence – JOScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carmody Groarke is an architecture practice based in London."This idea of thinness [of surfaces] has to do with pragmatism and thrift, but it's also a contemporary challenge of buildings – now that we've disassembled the monolithic way of traditional construction we have to consider the making of walls in a different way, and yet we enjoy that discipline of making the most with the least." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Albert Williamson Taylor is a design engineer and founder of AKT II.“The goal has always got to be the project – the design – everything else is just an inconvenience. Even deciding to start a practice was very much that. It’s a means to an end, and the end in my view is being able to contribute with your abilities, rather than what’s expected of you.” – AWTScaffold is an Architecture Foundation podcast, produced by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Albert Williamson Taylor is a design engineer and founder of AKT II. “The goal has always got to be the project – the design – everything else is just an inconvenience. Even deciding to start a practice was very much that. It’s a means to an end, and the end in my view is being able to contribute with your abilities, rather than what’s expected of you.”  – AWT Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation podcast, produced by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Demand is an artist working in Berlin and Los Angeles"When architects look at my work it’s like when you show your work to your mother – she looks at something completely different than when you show your work to your peers. Architects are not “Mother”, but they see different aspects of my work than the art world do.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode was recorded in October of 2020, and originally aired in July of 2021. Esther Choi is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and writer trained in photography and architectural history and theory. “[In Le Corbuffet] I was trying to experiment with whether or not you could introduce a critical message into a circulation network that was unsuspecting, which is why the idea of “soft power” is so interesting to me […] We’re used to negational critique, and that’s been the predominant axis by which we talk about critique in architecture and art […] But you can also introduce challenging or political ideas through seduciton, or pleasure, or sensation, which is what a lot of architects from the 1960’s did”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode originally aired in October 2020Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering.“Disability knocks at the foundations of individualism […] If needfulness is actually universal, and if slowness is also part of life, and if dependence is partly what makes us human, that actually changes everything in terms of our ideas about the social contract […] The giving and receiving of care is in all of our lives; I think we really do want a world where care is part of the landscape of existence.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Heatherwick is a designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio in London."I’m inspired by people who don’t try to impress other people in their profession [...] The people who really matter are the public who you are doing projects for. What actually matters, In the big picture of time, is what matters to the people around us." Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tacita Dean is a visual artist who works in Berlin and Los Angeles "The direction in which I’m going is never fixed. Because I don’t know where I’m going, I’m very able to change direction. . . only at the very end of the process does all this nascent information suddenly have resonance – only in the singularity of the final work does the impact of this desperate journey make any sense."Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sam Chermayeff is an architect based in Berlin."The success of all interiors are specifics – specific wobbles, specific things in the way, specific dirt behind the ears of a house […] It’s wildly inefficient way of designing […] and it can drive people crazy, but the notion that you can provide this joyous instability for people – I want to offer that to everyone." Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin founded the design practice Soft Baroque in 2013, and are currently based in Ljubljana. “For us, the satisfaction of buying something pales in comparison to even pushing a button and hitting print on a 3D printer or hitting play on a CNC machine – there is a fascination that we have with making things work and making something in three dimensions [...] It feels like the type of urge that could replace our consumer desires.”Link to Nicholas Gardner's tag poemsScaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, produced by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Wentworth is an artist based in London. "Without feeling sorry for myself, I feel like a bit of a misfit […] I don’t really have a tidy sense of where [I belong]. I want to be effective. I would be a bit bored if I died and no one ever mentioned me again – not because I want them to say “do you know he was such and such” – I’d like to be the grit in a lot of shoes, and I’d like that grit to be useful across quite a lot of subjects."Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, produced by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moshe Safdie is an architect based in Boston who first came to prominence through his Habitat 67 project, a modular housing prototype constructed for the Montreal Expo in 1967. Safdie's memoir, If Walls Could Speak, has just been published by Atlantic Books.“It’s not that I avoid a signature style, I just allow things to mutate […] I marvel in the differences of place, and I bring them out and I enjoy them because I think that I’m making buildings that are more rooted. For me this is the pleasure of design.” Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deem Journal co-founders Nu Goteh, Alice Grandoit and Marquise Stillwell discuss an expanded definition of design as a social process. “publishing is a ritual act of listening, and for us we’re really trying to orient ourselves to become better listeners, and to thus orient an audience to become better listeners, with the hope that through this listening we can arrive at a better ethics around our relationship to each other and the planet.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Flores & Prats are an architecture practice based in Barcelona. “The theatre and the common spaces are the same experience. Going to the theatre is not getting into a room where you suddenly forget the outside world, going to the theatre is meeting your friend at the ticket box, at the sofa going the bar, have a beer, coffee, anxious, waiting to start, and meeting the actors, and everything is a continuity[…] The theatre has exploded to occupy the whole building, not just the two performance spaces.” Flores & Prats Website@floresyprats Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Introducing Power & Public Space, a new podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation. This episode features a conversation with professor Mabel O. Wilson on the Memorial to Enslaved Labourers at the University of Virginia. Listen to the full series on ITunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Scaffold returns with new episodes later this month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Pinckers is a photographer based in Brussels.“The subject and themes [of my photographs] are a reflection of how I see photography, or how I want to deal with photography - the subject matter is always a mirror for the medium as well.” https://www.maxpinckers.be/@maxpinckersScaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freek Persyn is professor of architecture and urban transformation at ETH in Zurich, and together with Johan Anrys and Peter Swinnen founded the practice 51N4E in 1998. “Architecture is not often talked about in terms of transience, its very much focusing always on the final product, and this final product is captured before its used - it’s trying to monumentalise or eternalise one fragment of time that doesn’t really even exist, which is the finished building before it is even in use […] I would say that instead, we are talking about this whole thing – this whole process of architecture – and valuing every moment of it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carla Juacaba is a Brazilian architect based in London. “I’m compelled by theatre for its impermanence, that things end, in a way that it’s not even possible to record; it’s very fascinating to see things dissipating, then that’s it. When I worked in exhibition design I was already fascinated by how despite this temporary effect, ideas live on in our minds forever - architecture can be temporary but it remains a part of our imaginary world.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Asif Khan is a designer of buildings, landscapes, exhibitions and installations. “It’s helpful sometimes to think that architecture is made up. All of this cannon, all of this writing, all of this schooling […] let’s just imagine it’s a religion of some sort that you’re operating within, but before that religion there were other religions, and so it’s about stepping outside of that world and seeing what else is possible.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lesley Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute and curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. “I don’t see myself as being ‘the future’, but the expanded field [of architecture] that I’ve operated in for most of my life has given me something that is of use to he generation coming behind me, so that no matter how I end up making my living, I see myself first and foremost as a teacher.”Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. For more information visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Taylor Foster is a writer and curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes. "When I think about curatorial practice I start to think about what it means to nest in the complexity of things […] There’s an ambition to not dumb things down, but to create space for close looking and close feeling, through experiences, through objects, and through the creation or maintenance of conversations” Interlude audio is from the youtube video [ASMR] Dark & Relaxing Tapping & Scratching [Close Whispers] by GibiASMR Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paloma Gormley is a founding director of both Practise Architecture and Material Cultures, bringing together design, research and action towards a post carbon built environment."There’s an inherent tension in the work that we’re trying to do, in that we’re trying to change the nature of authorship – there’s a real risk with the rise of technology, it follows that power, agency and authorship become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands […] One of the things that’s exciting about building with natural materials is that those technical barriers – which we’ve created with petrochemical culture and their associated layers of liability – in a way a lot of that ‘technification’ goes out the window, and you’re back to a much more straightforward way of doing things.”https://practicearchitecture.co.uk/https://materialcultures.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Takeshi Hayatsu is an architect based in London and founding director of Hayatsu Architects. “ …That sort of fear, and darkness beyond our control that exists in the natural world is something we’ve somehow forgotten following the modernist movement […] People tend to become arrogant – we assume we control everything – so animism and symbolism are things I’m interested in, in terms of finding ways to pay respect to nature, in a way that should really come back more now in the age of environmental crisis.” The "Red School" architects mentioned in this episode include: Takamasa Yoshizaka Yuko Saito Osamu Ishiyama Terunobu Fujimori Keisuke Oka Other references: Genpei Aksegawa – Leader of "Rojo street observation society" Ferdinand Cheval – architect of the "Ideal Palace"Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The European Prize for Urban Public Space is an observatory of European cities that recognises the best works to create, recover, transform and improve public spaces in Europe.Matthew recently spoke with the prize’s director, Judit Carrera, to find out more.Registration is open for submissions from 20 April to 17 May 2022. The conditions of entry and everything you need to know to take part in the Prize are available at www.publicspace.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode originally aired on 23 April 2020. It was recorded in person in at the Kingston School of Art in December of 2019. Clancy Moore architects have been nominated for a 2022 EU Mies Award, and will be presenting their work at the Barbican Centre on 23 March 2022 as part of the Architecture on Stage series. To book tickets visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/architecture-on-stage-clancy-moore---Andrew Clancy is a director of the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore, and Professor of Architecture at the Kingston School of Art.“There isn’t an Irish style, and I don’t really think there is an Irish tectonic, but there is a space for a particular type of plural conversation in Ireland - one that uses multiple engagements with the history of architecture that comes from our slightly marginal location […] It allows architects to act with territorial intent, with great sincerity, and with no attempt at cynicism or anything like that […] I think that as the world moves to being one where people do more and more work on fabric and less and less monument, and there’s more and more contingencies and we’re more aware of the world, that kind of curiosity and that sincerity is useful right now.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode originally aired on 9 April 2020. It was recorded in person in a noisy hotel cafe, so the audio quality is variable (it gets better after the first few minutes). It's one of my favourite conversations. If you haven't heard it yet, enjoy!- Matthew ---Francesca Torzo is an Architect based in Italy.“In all of our projects there is always a construction experiment, but that is never the purpose. It seems that we just land there, to find a solution that is able to combine severable variables. Most of the time the most sensitive variable is silence - this naturalness where you don’t need to see all of the effort.“ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Founded by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, Space Popular is an experimental design practice that has made its name in exploring the architectural potential of digital space.“Architecture is a communication medium, and we believe that in our lifetimes we will be able to experience architecture at the speed of the spoken word; you will be able to create and experience space at the speed at which you form and communicate your own thoughts. It maybe seems scary, but we’re going to inch towards that slowly and once we are there, we will have an infinitely more productive way to communicate with each other.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ryan Scavnicky is an educator, architectural theorist and founder of the practice Extra Office. He's also been described as "the godfather of the architecture meme." “I think of theory way more as a practice and I think of criticism way more as a practice than as this thing that floats around in books – the theory is the feed; the theory is the hive mind meme page; the theory is the tiktok account – I think those are all bonafide methods of the production of contemporary architectural theory” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lee Ivett is an architect, educator and founder of the participatory architecture, art and design studio Baxendale – a practice best known for developing low-budget socially-led projects within communities across the UK.“For me, just being in a place and registering it through your own human experience – your own emotional experience, your own physical experience - I started to understand that that was far more informative, and that your own instinct, reactions and discomforts were far more informative, and actually could be a mode of research - a more empathic, situated, lived mode of research - than some of the more normative modes of analysis and research that you’d find in an architecture school.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Max Creasy is an architectural photographer based in Berlin.“I’m more interested now in formulating my own [photographic] language, which is a mixture of still life photography, or the way you might work with portrait photography, or vernacular photography — asking what this might constitute as architectural photography. I’m interested in photographing the building, not rendering the building. I’m interested in letting the camera be a camera, and not trying to falsify how the camera sees it.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hélène Binet is an architectural photographer based in London "In a construction site you imagine what remains unfinished - you see the structure but you make up the rest. Similarly the ruin is more than what you perceive [...] In both cases, with the building site and the ruin, they are about you imagining, which is the most important thing you could want to do with an image, because in the end if you can’t imagine, I’m just giving you information, and that’s not what I want to do. I want you to enter, and imagine." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Scott is a self-taught artist based in Oakland, California. Scott works out of a gallery and studio called Creative Growth that advances the inclusion of artists with developmental disabilities. (Scott was born schizophrenic and is also on the autistic spectrum.) Scott Frequently describes himself as an architect, reinventing the social topography of a gentrified San Francisco, as a utopian city he calls ‘Praise Frisco’ in works that combine architectural design with civic responsibility to describe his desire for a more equitable society. The first significant survey of Scott’s 30–year practice was recently exhibited at Studio Voltaire - a London-based not–for–profit arts organisation. Notes: videos:Michael Maltzan & David Ogunmuyiwa with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The World and the City RESOLVE and PoOR Collective with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The Cultural Meaning of the City Tom DiMaria and Matthew Higgs on the Work of William Scottarticles: The Turner prize and the rise of neurodiverse art Roberta Smith and Holland Carter - Best Shows of 2021 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

[This episode originally aired on 21 March 2018]Pablo Bronstein is an artist based in London. "I’m from a generation that lives entirely within irony - so that everything is a quotation, everything is double-sided, everything is good and bad […] In order to feel that you’re simultaneously lying and telling the truth, it’s because there is a ‘you’ there somehow - there is a core at the centre that is able to perceive the difference between truth and lie. The majority of young people today have a very different relationship to themselves, and I think it has something to do with how external their lives are now, and how there is less self-formation early on in life, so you are given more options to choose from but they are just a series of options pre-fabricated for you […] I’ve always said that people under the age of 25 don’t really have a sub-conscious. There’s nothing really there, or rather, there’s a lot there but it’s the same all the way through."Correction: In this interview it is suggested that Adam Nathaniel Furman had written a response to a 2017 Dezeen article by Sean Griffiths. In fact no such response has been published. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

[This episode originally aired on 9 May 2019] Mary Duggan was a founding partner of Duggan Morris Architects, and established Mary Duggan Architects in 2017.“I think [architects] are obsessed with justification, but sometimes in architecture you can’t explain everything. Lots of architects, and I’m not one of them, find an amazing historic building and want to pull it apart to understand it, and want that understanding of it to inform their work, and I just don’t think you need that all the time. I think we’ve forgotten we’re intuitive - that you can go to a site and decide quite instantly what it should be.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Job Floris is co-founder of Monadnock, an architecture practice based in Rotterdam. “A lot of ideas and buildings that we find intriguing were part of the discourse of postmedernity in the 1980s, and if you step away from the [lack of craftsmanship] of these buildings, then a lot of topics are very relevant and really require a new take. I have the feeling that since the 80s we have learned more about how we can make tangible and tactile buildings; making images, masks, symbols and assemblages would not necessarily deny the idea of craft and the construction of tangible and elegant architecture.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Robertson is a poet and art writer. “There are parts of consciousness that go unsaid, that have not yet found the language or the representational modes that can open them further, and I think that’s really the only thing that interest me as a writer […] I’m interested really in what’s ‘unpublishable’ – what happens before any person reaches a threshold of self-representation – and I feel that threshold is more and more the place I want to be. I want to be doing my work in that stinky inner chute of the cheap hotel where the concierges hang their rancid rags. That’s the space I want to be working in. I want to be working in the unspeakable space.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Robertson is a poet and art writer. “[Vitruvius’s original notion of] “commodiousness” as a receptive potential in architecture — architecture that can receive the most of human experience — has been reduced to the notion of “commodity,” that which moves with the least tension and conflict. So I appropriated this term from Vitruvius in architectural discourse; how can I make this work more commodious? How can it receive more complexity? How can it have a denser, richer social existence?” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A rerun, and an update by The Architecture Foundation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Esther Choi is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and writer trained in photography and architectural history and theory. “[In Le Corbuffet] I was trying to experiment with whether or not you could introduce a critical message into a circulation network that was unsuspecting, which is why the idea of “soft power” is so interesting to me […] We’re used to negational critique, and that’s been the predominant axis by which we talk about critique in architecture and art […] But you can also introduce challenging or political ideas through seduciton, or pleasure, or sensation, which is what a lot of architects from the 1960’s did” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pooja Agrawal and Joseph Zeal Henry are co founders of @sound_x_advice _"[The Sound Advice book] comes out of Blackout Tuesday, and just seeing the shameless, fake, performative response of the [architecture] industry. We were so worried about rushing the book out to capture this moment, but a year later there aren’t many examples of significant structural change […] The fact that the two of us, working full time [on other jobs] have managed to mobilise this amount of people, publish a book and have quite a lot of impact, and yet well-funded institutions haven’t managed to move the dial forward that much, is a testament; the book becomes a mirror to say “we’ve done this - what have you actioned?” _Listen to the Sound Advice x Scaffold playlist here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/57LrC32MaOTiqFDZi3BJZP_Scaffold is supported in part by The Architecture Foundation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beka & Lemoine are documentary filmmakers based in Italy. “The question of fragmentation of thought and narration, which has necessarily an impact on the way you understand completeness and objectivity […] these are topics that we had developed over the years in the various films we’ve made as a basis of principles on which we’ve built up our methodology […] of looking for the most subjective, the most fragile position in what we defend, rather than copying that absurd tone of objectivity that you find in most architecture films.”◣ Support scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alvaro Barrington is an artist working in New York and London.“In terms of cultural production, I do think that the erasure that has happened to women, to people of colour, we have to work against that, because it creates a space where people feel lesser than because they don’t feel like they have contributed to the conversation when that is far from the truth, and then it also creates a space where white men feel more entitled to invention even though they haven’t been more inventive than any other race…and so it creates two sorts of violence within people - one feeling lesser than, and then one where white men maybe feel inadequate because they’re not as great as this other white man, and so that anxiety plays out in their head. Because we have created these false narratives we see all of this internalised violence, and I do think it’s our generation’s thing to maybe start correcting that truth.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neri & Hu are an architecture and design practice based in Shanghai  “The right projects aren’t defined by fees at all […] the right projects are defined by their potential to bring breakthroughs. Our fear is the lack of time, and the risk of losing ourselves and our own vision amidst all this busyness” Support this podcast to help sustain future episodes: visit Patreon.com/Scaffold Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This special episode of Scaffold features a conversation with Ellis Woodman and Rosie Gibbs-Stevenson of the Architecture Foundation.For 100 days from April to August, the AF put on a series of nearly 300 lectures, interviews, building tours and panel discussions, handing over the virtual stage to a diverse cast of practitioners from all over the world, from Alvaro Siza to Yasmeen Lari, Kate Macintosh to Jack Self, all hosted virtually and free to view on youtube. In this conversation Ellis and Rosie reflect on the 100 Day Studio and the possibilities it has opened up for architectural discourse. Visit architecturefoundation.org.uk for more information and upcoming events, and consider becoming a member or making a donation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering.“Disability knocks at the foundations of individualism […] If needfulness is actually universal, and if slowness is also part of life, and if dependence is partly what makes us human, that actually changes everything in terms of our ideas about the social contract […] The giving and receiving of care is in all of our lives; I think we really do want a world where care is part of the landscape of existence.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chris Dorley Brown is a photographer living and working in London I suspect that [I’m documenting] what you might call the last days of the civil contract between state and people. I get worried that the post war optimism […] exemplified by architecture - I’m talking about public buildings and public spaces that are built for no other reason than to help us, maybe a library or a block of flats, they weren’t put there for any particular profit or gain – that’s the contract that I feel I’m witnessing the end of. There’s been a breach somewhere along the line, and I spend my days looking for the remnants of it still in existence. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cia Rinne is an artist, writer and poetI don’t want to think about the audience while I’m writing, and I’m not excluding anybody voluntarily – nothing could be further from my thinking – but this kind of poetry work will probably not help people … and you don’t have any control [over whom it will reach] anyway. […]I don’t think that [poetry] is made to serve the public - I think that is the wrong ends to start with - I’m really starting from the work, and the fact that if I like it maybe someone else will too. And that’s good. You don’t know what to expect, and I don’t want to control that or have expectations - I think that’s the best starting point. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Caruso is an architect and co-director of Caruso St. John"[When we started our practice] we were really interested in the syntax of architecture - how you make a brick wall, how you make an opening - and we believed that the syntax of architecture held within it the culture of architecture. And the reason we concentrated on that rather than the semiotics of architecture is that we didn’t believe so much in a shared language [for architecture to speak symbolically]. We live in a society that’s diverse and globalised, and I’m trying to find positive ways of engaging with those things.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This special episode of Scaffold features a conversation between architect Mabel O. Wilson and Dario Calmese, host of the new podcast Institute of Black imagination. “We could be a very equitable society, it's just the will is not there. We have the resources — I don’t think its a project of inclusion, I think we have to radially change the system. If we have to destroy it and rebuild it, so be it. But I don’t think including us in the current system — it wipes us out, it’s not sustaining for us.”- Mabel O Wilson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Janina Gosseye is a scholar and co-editor, with Naomi Stead and Deborah Van der Plat, of the recently published Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research. “Architecture has long been dominated by elites, mostly western and male, and its historiography has often been dictated by what these individuals have to say about buildings. Speaking of Buildings seeks to open up the conversation, to shed light on those who have been silenced in architectural history or on those who have remained unheard”This interview was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation’s 100 Day Studio: https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/news/100-day-studio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Leech is an architect based in London. I don’t have ‘big ideas’ [in my work] - and if I do, I do everything I can to undermine them. I do not want a project to be read in one sentence, or understood in one sentence […] we don’t judge anything else like that - people are much more complex, and I think buildings are much more complex.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Clancy is a director of the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore, and Professor of Architecture at the Kingston School of Art. “There isn’t an Irish style, and I don’t really think there is an Irish tectonic, but there is a space for a particular type of plural conversation in Ireland - one that uses multiple engagements with the history of architecture that comes from our slightly marginal location […] It allows architects to act with territorial intent, with great sincerity, and with no attempt at cynicism or anything like that […] I think that as the world moves to being one where people do more and more work on fabric and less and less monument, and there’s more and more contingencies and we’re more aware of the world, that kind of curiosity and that sincerity is useful right now.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Francesca Torzo is an Architect based in Italy.“In all of our projects there is always a construction experiment, but that is never the purpose. It seems that we just land there, to find a solution that is able to combine severable variables. Most of the time the most sensitive variable is silence - this naturalness where you don’t need to see all of the effort.“ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Geoff Manaugh is an architecture writer based in Los Angeles. He launched BLDGBLOG in 2004 and is the author most recently of The Burglar's Guide to the City (2016). "Ideas of things to research and rabbit holes to go down are not always in your discipline. Whether its anthropology or poetry or crime, these things that might change your life are everywhere, and they’re hiding in plain sight." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Maltzan is an architect based in Los Angeles. "I think it’s important to try to anticipate the city in the future […] to speculate about how scale and density is going to change, because architecture not only takes a long time to get built, but it exists for a long time as well, and it’s very likely that if you try to build a building that relates to a rapidly changing context, by the time it’s built it’s already out of scale – it’s already a part of the past […] The idea that we as architects have a responsibility to try and meet the scale, the relationships and context in the future is something that is very difficult to talk about because we are trying to describe and anticipate a speculative vision of the city, but I think it’s incumbent in what we do” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Natsai Audrey Chieza is Founding Director of Faber Futures, a multidisciplinary design agency operating at the intersection of nature, technology, and society.“I’m interested in futures, and I’m interested in how we actually structurally make changes that can bring forward futures that are more equitable. My approach is to, if you like, be what we think [the future] is. It is through this process of doing that you can better articulate how you think it could work. It is through the process of doing that you can actually build a network to make it work. This goes back to the decision to put the speculative aside and start just being it through practice. This became a necessary and strategic device to get shit done, because then you are in the lab, making and experimenting and someone is going to want to know more.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Patkau is an architect based in Vancouver."I always seek out the opposite. I’ve always been interested in architects who are least like me – the ones who are most like me I find objectionable." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shumi Bose is an architecture teacher, curator and editor."[Curation] is the idea of taking care of a conversation. Whether that conversation is for students, for academic learning, or whether its for a conversation within a community, or within a broader public […] it’s a similar process of nurturing and selecting. So in that sense it feels like I’m doing the same thing - it’s the format that changes” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Kundig is a director of the Seattle-based architecture practice Olson Kundig."I think there is this danger in architecture, that it becomes so self referential and circular in its myopic position that it forgets that we’re really a part of a much bigger world. I’m actually more interested in that world than I am in the architectural world." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Farshid Moussavi is an architect and educator based in London. "I’m interested in buildings, not architects. The building is independent once the architect is gone, and that’s when the building becomes a more open and detached from notions of representation. I would say buildings are closer to how people understand contemporary art today. The interesting thing about art is precisely the fa that is is so polysemic - we stand in front of a piece of art and we will all take away different things from it, and I think buildings perform in a similar way." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte Cooper is a Psychotherapist, Cultural Worker and Fat Activist. “The therapy I do, and maybe therapy in general enables people to think about their lives in ways they hadn’t considered before. It’s about illuminating the dusty corners that they may have forgotten or overlooked, and showing them that there may be value in those places. […] We are in society, and we’re bound by the tensions and rules of society, but there's still a lot of space for agency and choice within those strictures.”This episode originally aired on 7 March 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum in London “A friend of mine once said to me no magazine you’ll ever want to read will ever sell more than 8000 copies a month […] What was startling to find is that, when Zaha Hadid was by no means the establishment we did a show with her in my early days at the Design Museum, which sold 75,000 tickets. No book on architecture would ever sell that many copies - and it’s interesting what it is that makes this physical experience work in ways which text doesn’t.” This episode was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation's Dodecanalle Summit in April 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Kohn is an architect based in London. “The contemporary economies of architectural production inevitably tend toward the shed. The shed is this panacea - everything can be a shed. […] We can now build these vast, expansive structures, and the idea is that they’re kind of good for everything but in fact they rob everyone of all of these other spaces that allow you to be sociable in many more ways [….] We all need this, we need spaces where you can sit with a couple of other people and enjoy a meal or a drink.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Omer Arbel is an architect and industrial designer based in Vancouver.“When I talk about the receding of ego in my work, that is the method - I encourage materials to teach me, but there’s obviously an editorial moment in that process where I want a specific aesthetic extreme to emerge […] What I hope to do here in our practice is make work that has a cultural relevance to this very strange moment in time now. If we are rigorous to this time and place in human history, then we make work that is culturally relevant and has a longevity simply because of the fidelity it has to the zeitgeist.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mary Duggan was a founding partner of Duggan Morris Architects, and established Mary Duggan Architects in 2017. “I think [architects] are obsessed with justification, but sometimes in architecture you can’t explain everything. Lots of architects, and I’m not one of them, find an amazing historic building and want to pull it apart to understand it, and want that understanding of it to inform their work, and I just don’t think you need that all the time. I think we’ve forgotten we’re intuitive - that you can go to a site and decide quite instantly what it should be.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John ‘Sinx’ Sinclair is a founding partner of the digital product design studio ustwo. “It’s the functionality of something rather than the aesthetics of something that pleases me. Software lends its benefit to that because you can iterate and change. It’s not about just launching [a product] in one big go, but about identifying challenges and making incremental improvements.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lütjens Padmanabhan are an architecture practice based in Zurich. “How do you deal with the cheapening of the building, where the value and architectural significance of the building was once based on monolithic weight and closed form, a lack of open joints, a kind of illusion of truthful construction […] When we liberate ourselves from that dogma we can open up towards all kinds of more complex ideas of the relationship between construction and truth.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tom Emerson is a founding director of 6a architects. “One of the positions that [my teaching] takes is to not distinguish between architecture - the constructed world - and nature […] Somehow to look at the weeds, and the gravel and the rubble, and the forest and the city as equivalent, without hierarchy.They are the environment, they’re the only one we’ve got, and all of them need to be looked after.”◣ Support scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anna Mill and Luke Jones are authors of the graphic novel Square Eyes. “The future city still has to get designed somehow, and augmented reality is not settled - they need more ideas. In terms of speculative design as a pursuit [...] there’s a positive need for it, but to find a way of doing it that has critical integrity” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Barbara Penner is Professor in the Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture. "[My allegiance] is to feminism and always has been. What’s happened within feminist scholarship is that as the feminist perspective has become less controversial it’s gone underground slightly […] At a recent conference these questions were raised - are we now being too subtle and too implicit about our feminism? […] do we need to once again nail our colours to the mast and be very explicit about our feminism, how that shapes our scholarship, and so on? - that’s quite interesting because it implies that to adopt a certain political position there’s a kind of ethical responsibility to write in a particular way. That’s a kind of live debate - is that self-reflexivity inherent to being a feminist - which implies that there’s a certain rigidity there towards how you should be as a scholar. That moment really interests me - that you’re not just an individual scholar, you’re actually carrying the mantle, and that comes with a certain ethical set of choices that you make about your voice." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

OK-RM are a design studio working in the fields of art, culture and commerce. “'Graphic designer' is something that comes up a lot in this conversation and it’s almost something that we’re anti. We call ourselves a design practice mainly because we really love that idea that what we do could transcend any particular medium or discipline. It’s out of real respect - not for ulterior motives - only because we believe in a universality of design” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Irénée Scalbert is an architecture critic and teacher based in London“What interests me is how architecture relates to experience […] this is the great question of architecture - how can one make something so intangible and inclusive as experience at home in something as rigid, as inflexible as architecture?” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stephen Bates is an architect and founding partner of Sergison Bates architects.“I enjoy the idea [in architecture] that you don’t always see everything immediately - that you have to look again and again, or be invited that bit further in, and a world is uncovered […] In a way that seems to be anti-Modernist, where transparency, borderlessness, threshold-freeness, a blurring of inside and outside, are all absolutely paramount." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andy Dixon is a painter based in Los Angeles.“I don’t want to come across like I’m making fun of the rich, or that I’m making fun of my patrons, if anything, I think I’m making fun of those artists who are perfectly willing to accept the money from these people but then pretend that they’re not part of the system. I find that really annoying, and a little dishonest, really - artists who feel it’s taboo to talk about the fact that they are entangled in a world of luxury” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jack Self is an architect and writer. He is the founding director of the Real Foundation and editor in chief of the Real Review.“The subjectivity of the white middle class heterosexual male - you know, that’s what the 20th century was about. And when they spoke about Modernism that’s who they thought Modernism was for […] I’ve never felt guilty about owning that subjectivity. On the other hand I feel that once you recognise it, you have to assume responsibility for it, and you have to also ask yourself, given that I occupy this position of privilege and power, how can I use that to advance the causes of others?” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles Holland is an architect and former director of Fashion Architecture Taste. “However much narrative or literary ways into [architecture] that you have, the physicality of the thing you’re designing is increasingly to me what you need to engage in […] Ideas develop now in a different way than they did in the F.A.T. office, and probably that is because they develop with less discussion as a starting point. I’m much happier now to start with a thing and not know what it is, and to follow that process and be a little looser and more open about where it might lead” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steven J. Fowler is a poet and artist based in London. “Poetry is a way of mediating our own confusion about the role language plays in the relationship between ourselves and our thoughts, and ourselves and other human beings. It is essentially the problem of other minds, with language put at the forefront […] When I began writing poetry I tried to control language to create emotional insight, and that is what I think most poems try to do […] and it is my belief now that that’s not true. […] After trying for a couple of years to write smooth poems about wild animals or foxes or whatever poets do in the countryside I realised actually I can’t control anything, I’m going to die, and that language, before that death, will not comfort me […] The first note of understanding language before you re-displace it as an art form is to understand that it will always fail to communicate what you want to communicate.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

IF_DO are a London-based architecture practice, led by Al Scott, Sarah Castle and Thomas Bryans.“There’s a general shift at the moment away from a more egotistical architecture and towards a more community based architecture, and I think that comes across in our name and a lot of new practice’s names as well […] We had to think of who we were writing [our manifesto] for - were we writing it for other architects to read, or were we writing it for our clients, for people we are building buildings for?” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Waugh is a founding director of Waugh Thistleton Architects. “We have climate change […] this issue bigger than anything else that’s ever faced us, and the fact that the vast majority of architects are not discussing it, confronting it, engaging with it, to me seems insane. It seems to me that this could be the end of the idea of architects unless we engage with this issue.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maria Smith is a founding director of the interdisciplinary architecture and engineering practice Interrobang. She is also a former founding director of the architecture practice Studio Weave.“Architecture is very much associated with human flourishing, and that’s what degrowth is all about […] We are all complicit in this, we are all trapped in this paradigm of economic growth, so it’s going to have to involve all of us in some way in order to shift it. With the Oslo Architecture Triennale We’re trying to explore architecture’s role in this thing that arguably is going to happen - the question is does it happen by collapse or does it happen by design."Correction - Matthew Dalziel's sirname was mispronounced at the top of the show. The correct pronunciation is Dee-ELL. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shajay Bhooshan is co-founder of the computational design group at Zaha Hadid Architects. "We want to address the social but not without aesthetic language […] I don’t think [the study of housing] can be aesthetic free, and we chose to attach catenaries and descriptive geometry as an a-priori because that’s the language we are most researched in […] One way or another you need a language to attach to these social studies, it cannot happen in a vacuum. There has to be a language attached to the ordering of social processes." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Johanna Gibbons is a landscape architect and founding partner of J & L Gibbons. “There really isn’t any wilderness left on the planet. [Wildness] is to do with how we envisage our landscapes and our relationship with natural processes, understanding where we’ve interrupted them, and appreciating how we can mend and reconfigure them […] Stewardship is what my profession is about, we are stewards of the planet.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Fraser Muggeridge is a graphic designer based in London. “I’m always trying to create typefaces that are a little bit wrong, that are a little bit off […] We’re in a world now where it’s actually quite easy for graphic designers and non graphic designers to create a piece of communication that actually looks alright. If you use a new font, you don’t really have to do much, whereas if you’ve got a font that’s got a few problems you have to work harder. So I often do that - I often work really hard to make something look nearly normal.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Philippe Malouin is an industrial designer based in London. “I graduated in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, and I think it humbled a lot of people […] Nowadays you need to be nice and work hard in order to get ahead, I don’t think being a rockstar and having an ego will get you anywhere.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pablo Bronstein is an artist based in London. "I’m from a generation that lives entirely within irony - so that everything is a quotation, everything is double-sided, everything is good and bad […] In order to feel that you’re simultaneously lying and telling the truth, it’s because there is a ‘you’ there somehow - there is a core at the centre that is able to perceive the difference between truth and lie. The majority of young people today have a very different relationship to themselves, and I think it has something to do with how external their lives are now, and how there is less self-formation early on in life, so you are given more options to choose from but they are just a series of options pre-fabricated for you […] I’ve always said that people under the age of 25 don’t really have a sub-conscious. There’s nothing really there, or rather, there’s a lot there but it’s the same all the way through."Correction: In this interview it is suggested that Adam Nathaniel Furman had written a response to a 2017 Dezeen article by Sean Griffiths. In fact no such response has been published. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charlotte Cooper is a Psychotherapist, Cultural Worker and Fat Activist. “The therapy I do, and maybe therapy in general enables people to think about their lives in ways they hadn’t considered before. It’s about illuminating the dusty corners that they may have forgotten or overlooked, and showing them that there may be value in those places. […] We are in society, and we’re bound by the tensions and rules of society, but there's still a lot of space for agency and choice within those strictures.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

David Grandorge is an architectural photographer and educator. "Looking at the complexity of the world one can obviously become sad about it. One can become sad about one’s own life, or one’s feeling of the loss of power [...] I think visual solace is a way of coping with one’s ability to deal with these traumas - it's a better way than taking drugs." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Nathaniel Furman is a London based designer. "For me once something is made it achieves this sort of holy status, which requires silence [...] By the time that something is made real, if there’s narrative and depth that’s been part of the process of designing it, that should come across as an atmosphere. There’s nothing I dislike more than being shown something and then needing a text to explain to me what it is." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.