Scaffold

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 cha...

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 infor...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 a...

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 abou...

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 b...

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...

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...

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 f...

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 s...

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...

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 ot...

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...

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 h...

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...

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...