Scaffold

Late last year a new museum opened its doors in Lagos, Nigeria, called The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History. It is among a new generation of African cultural institutions – including the Bet Bi museum in Senegal, by Mariam Kamara, and the Museum of West African Art in Benin City by Adjaye Associates – which in different ways attempts to reimagine both the form and format of t...

Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher born in 1990 in Nazareth. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Kingston University (2012) and a Master of Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture (2016). ​ Srouji's interdisciplinary practice explores the ground as a repository of cultural narratives and potential collective healing. She employs various media—including g...

Alison Crawshaw, whose practice encompasses architecture, landscape, urban design, and installations, is on the pod this week. In our conversation we focus on two key projects of hers that bookend her practice to date, and that share a philosophy of working with existing conditions rather than imposing top-down transformations.  The first project, from 2012, called the politics of bricollage,...

badweather , founded by Oli Brenner, Sophie Mei Birkin and Leo Sixsmith in 2019, are an architecture and scenography collective based in London. badweather’s work represents a strand of contemporary practice that became more visible in the wake of the pandemic, and one distinct from the climate survivalism, social moralism, and poetic despair that has come to dominate much of architectural discour...

Gonçalo André Pires is an architect and co-founder, together with Pedro Santo Saraiva, of Studio Sotnas , a practice based between Aarhus and Lisbon. "While in the 90s and 2000s there were a lot of idealistic inventions and visions that wanted to be forced into being, now it’s more about reassembling and reorganising existing meanings and values in the things that we might we already have at...

Art writer and former Spike  columnist Dean Kissick stops by the pod to discuss his most recent article "The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art" – published in the December 2024 issue of Harper's. Read Dean's article here . Support the Architecture Foundation by becoming (or gifting) a Patreon membership. More details here . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

Edward Jones is the co-author, along with the late Christopher Woodward, of the Guide to the Architecture of London, which, originally published in 1983, is now in its fifth edition and has become the definitive guide book of the subject. In 2017 the guide book became the basis of an app - called the London architecture Guide , and one of the Architecture Foundation’s most ambitious projects. earl...

dorsa is a collective architecture practice founded by Yufei He, James Horkulak and Pan Hu in 2021. In their own words, they "seek to capture multiple and parallel realities concealed within our time, and employ whichever medium necessary to create optimistic narratives for an empathic future." Support the Architecture Foundation by becoming a Patreon Member . This episode was generously supported...

This episode was recorded live at the Barbican Centre's Frobisher Auditorium on 25 June 2024, with panelists Bob Allies of Allies and Morrison ; Charlie Edmonds of the grassroots activist group Future Architects Front ; Cristina Gaidos + Maia Rollo of the recently formed union Section of Architectural Workers ; and Jane Issler Hall + Owen Lacey of the the architecture collective Assemble .  S...

Petra Blaisse is a designer and founding partner of Inside / Outside. Blaisse started her career in 1978 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in the Department of Applied Arts. From 1986 onwards, she worked as freelance exhibition designer and won distinction for her installations of architectural works. Gradually her focus shifted to the use of textiles, light and finishes in interior space and,...

The Architecture Foundation gratefully acknowledge the Delegation of Flanders to the UK for their support in producing this episode. Recorded on site at Horst Arts and Music Festival in Vilvoorde, Belgium on Saturday 11 May 2024, episode 108 includes conversations with Mattias Staelens, founder of Onkruid and the inspiration behind the Horst Festival, and Carole Depoorter, Horst art and architectu...

Florian Summa and Anne Femmer are founding directors of the Leipzig based Summacumfemmer and guest professors at the University of the Arts in Berlin. The practice's built work includes San Riemo (2020), a co-operative housing development in Munich designed with Büro Juliane Greb. Summa and Femmer were co-curators of Open for Maintenance, the German contribution to the 2023 Venice Architectur...

Minsuk Cho is a Korean architect and designer of this year's Serpentine Pavilion. "We have a demanding role as architects, and I think movies are a good comparison: it’s always so polarising – there are serious directors, versus blockbuster directors – but there is a way of doing both." Show notes: Eun-Me Ahn - Korean Choreographer  Cities on the Move - exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obris...

This week, AF Trustee Shumi Bose moderates a discussion on the state of architectural education with panellists Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art), Kester Rattenbury (former Professor of Architecture at the University of Westminster), and Neal Shasore (Head of the London School of Architecture). The event was recorded in front of a live audience on 1 February...

This special episode of Scaffold features a brief interview with the Austrian architect Herman Czech conducted by David Kohn in advance of Czech's 10.05.2024 Architecture Foundation lecture . The interview was recorded at Kohn's recently completed Smart's Place project in Covent garden for Baylight Properties. Czech's lecture coincided with a major retrospective of his work, Approximate Line of Ac...

Takaharu and Yui Tezuka founded Tezuka Architects in 1994 and are best known for their experimental designs for schools and kindergartens, chief among them the Fuji School in Tokyo. They are currently fundraising to build a new orphanage and school in India called the Jhamtse Gatsal Learning Centre . Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.  Download...

Phineas Harper develops cultural programmes that engage broad audiences with architecture and design. A regular contributor to  The Guardian and former Chief Executive of Open City, their career spans criticism, curation, education, youth engagement, journalism and sculpture. "I see my work as always having an eye on some other change that is about making a better built environment […] and th...

This episode originally aired in April 2022; Scaffold will be back with a new episode next week. 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 tha...

Fernanda Eberstadt is a New York born writer living in Europe. She has published five novels and two books of non-fiction, the latest of which is BITE YOUR FRIENDS: STORIES OF THE BODY MILITANT . "Art lies in the cracks, the deep tremors, the dysfunctions, in the gap between our own broken capabilities and the unpoliced world we’re hoping to create" – FE Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation prod...

Cristina Gamboa is a co-founder of the Barcalona-based architecture cooperative Lacol. "We are constantly fighting with budgets, and are often left with what is absolutely necessary – a “pure” architecture. […] When the manzanas [Cerda’s urban grid for Barcelona] were built without architects this lead to a homogeneity, or even genericness, that we are comfortable with, maybe because of its l...

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. I'm interested in the discrepancies that exist between imagined ideals and the realities of tolerance and conflict. In t...

“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...

Nicholas Lobo Brennan and Astrid Smitham founded Apparata, their London-based architecture practice, in 2016. "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’...

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 s...

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 o...