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.