Scaffold

[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...

[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 w...

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 a...

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 tha...

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 co...

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...

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, w...

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...

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 whe...

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 Acas...

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 Maci...

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...

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, th...

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...

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 beli...

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...

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 conver...

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 informatio...

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 l...

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/pri...

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." Host...

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...

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...

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.