Scaffold

Re-running this 2019 interview with Mary Duggan to celebrate her recent Stirling Prize win. Congrats Mary! Back again next week with a new episode. “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...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Tuomey comes on the pod to discuss Middle Quarter , the second volume of his memoir, recorded live at the Barbican on 27 July 2026 as part of the Architecture Foundation's Architecture on Stage series. Tuomey co-founded O'Donnell + Tuomey with Sheila O'Donnell in 1988. Together they have built the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar, the Glucksman in Cork, the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Saw...

Níall McLaughlin is this year's recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal—awarded for more than three decades of work ranging from a seaside bandstand at Bexhill to the Stirling Prize-winning library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. To mark the occasion, his practice has released a new book, published by Objectif Edition and co-edited with Bryony Jones. And it's far from your typical architecture mon...

Michael Mack is the founder of London-based independent art and photography publishing house MACK . This conversation was recorded live at POST PRESS. More info and upcoming event tickets here . Thanks to VELUX for supporting the podcast: velux.com/design Books discussed: W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, 2003) Le Corbusier, Aircraft (The Studio, 1935) Reconstru...

Jonathan Tuckey founded his design practice in 2000 having previously worked for David Chipperfield Architects and Fletcher Priest Architects. He has long been one of the UK's leading advocates for remodelling and radically transforming old buildings for modern uses. The podcast is supported this week by VELUX and features a short pre-reel interview with Thomas Vonier — architect and former presid...

Morgan Day is a writer based in Tucson Arizona who works across professional architecture writing and literary fiction. Her debut novel,The Oldest Bitch Alive, is out this month from Akoya Publishing in the UK, and Astra House in the US. “We tend to think of our bodies as having barriers, but we’re actually very porous. We’re in this constant state of becoming and effecting our environment, and ou...

Morgan Day is a writer based in Tucson Arizona who works across professional architecture writing and literary fiction. Her debut novel, The Oldest Bitch Alive , is out this month from Akoya Publishing in the UK, and Astra House in the US. “We tend to think of our bodies as having barriers, but we’re actually very porous. We’re in this constant state of becoming and effecting our environment, and...

Part 2 of our interview with the Finnish artist and writer Jaakko Pallasvuo, author most recently of Amber (Rrose Editions, 2026) and Mouthing the Words (Khaos, 2025) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jaakko Pallasvuo is a Helsinki-based artist and writer, best known for his Instagram account Avocado Ibuprofen . In this episode he reflects on the role he sees for art and writing in a world increasingly shaped by social media platforms and artificial intelligence, and he discusses his recently published collection of performance texts Mouthing the Words (Khaos, 2025). Scaffold is an Architecture...

Recorded live in London at the Barbican Centre earlier this month, this episode marks the publication of Order Prevails in Berlin , a new essay by the Italian novelist Vincenzo Latronico that acts as an autobiographical key to his highly acclaimed and Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Perfection .  Published by the Architecture Foundation and translated by Sophie Hughes, Order Prevails in B...

Architects from Herzog & de Meuron, Foster + Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects discuss how AI is entering the design studio, from generative design tools to new workflows shaping the future of practice. *This episode is supported by Chaos Group , and features a short conversation with the company's Head of Product Operations, Roderick Bates. Chaos develops visualization technologies that...

Daryan Knoblauch runs the eponymous architecture practice founded in 2024 in Berlin. His approach follows socio-cultural investigations of the present day, articulated in the form of cultural buildings, pavilions, and scenographies. The young Berlin studio works for clients such as Candela Capitán, Mowalola, Rombaut, and Judeline, among others, positioning architecture at the nexus of the cutting-...

The graphic designer John Morgan passed away last September at the age of 52. His final book, Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes , was published this week, and to mark the occasion we've collected som reflections on Morgan and his work from some of his collaborators. These include, in order of appearance, Tom Weaver former editor of the AA files, Shumi Bose and Kieran Long, who both worked with Morga...

Floris van der Poel comes on the pod this week to talk about the best work he’s discovered over the past year. Project list (in order of discussion): 1 The rounding of Cape Horn by Charlie Dalin.  2 Atelier Scheidegger Keller + Espazium, Areal Rosengarten Housing, Zurich, 2021 3 Emmanuel Héré de Corny's Palais du Gouvernement from the years 1751-1753  4 Meat cuts, comparing French and Am...

In part 2 of Kenneth Frampton’s Scaffold interview, we focus on his own experiences - from his early desire to become a farmer, and the long hesitation that kept him from starting a family, and his regrets around leaving architectural practice for a life of writing.  These biographical threads are woven through his encounters with key thinkers – from Herbert Marcuse and Tomas Maldonado to Juh...

Architectural historian Kenneth Frampton remembers the exact moment of his political awakening. Arriving in the United States in 1965, flying over the blazing island of Manhattan and suddenly grasping the visibility of capitalist power there—“a ferocious panorama” of light, cars and consumption that stood in stark contrast to what he calls the “concealed” capitalism of mid-century Britain. From th...

Today’s episode considers a part of the built environment that’s often overlooked in architectural discourse, yet has become one of the most vibrant sites of experimentation in recent years: the nightclub. Since the post-COVID resurgence of nightlife, we’ve seen club spaces music festivals become laboratories again — places where architects, artists and designers, artists test how bodies move, gat...

This special guest episode marks the launch of the podcast OMA at 50 . Conceived and produced by architect Richard Hall, the series explores the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s enduring influence on architectural culture, featuring conversations with an incredible roster of architects, academics, and historians. Marking OMA’s 50th anniversary, the podcast features some of the most authorita...

Truwant+Rodet+ is a Basel-based architecture firm founded in 2015 by Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet, which operates across the fields of architecture, landscape urbanism, exhibition making, installations, furniture design, research, and teaching. In 2017, they received the Swiss Art Award for their project A Pavilion. Since 2018, they have been developing the project, F...

Scaffold is back this week, with an episode that asks a simple question: why be an architect today? The Architecture Foundation is based inside the office of AHMM in Clerkenwell, which, back in July, hosted a summer school for teenagers just beginning to explore architecture. We decided to speak with some of them, to try and understand what draws young people to this profession today, what they th...

Paul Shepheard is a British architect and writer known for his philosophical and multidisciplinary approach to architecture. Shepheard was a student at the Architectural Association in the 1960’s, and has worked both in practice, for the likes of James Gowan, and in academia, teaching at institutions like the AA, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Kingston School of Art. As a writer, he is...

Recorded live from the Kontextur Podcast Festival at Khaus in Basel, this episode features a conversation with the curator Fredi Fischli. Fredi Fischli, along with Niels Olsen, is co-curator and co-director of exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Together with Niels, Fredi works on projects at the intersection of architecture, art, research and...

A month after the opening of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, we've invited three critics to come on the show to help make sense of what was arguably one of the most content overloaded, and curitorially ambiguous biennales in recent memory. Since its inception in 1980, The Venice architecture biennale has set the tone for global discourse on contemporary design and urbanism, and yet the a...

Patrick McGraw is the editor and publisher of Heavy Traffic magazine. Based in NYC, designed by Richard Turley and featuring contributions as varied as Sheila Heti, Keller Easterling and Dean Kissick, Heavy Traffic understands and reflects the mood of contemporary life in a way that fiction is increasingly well suited to.  Literature has the ability to capture our now terminally online consci...