Interviews With Architects, Artists & Designers

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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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:Michael Maltzan & David Ogunmuyiwa with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The World and the Cityhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUuNhKqYni8&ab_channel=ArchitectureFoundationRESOLVE and PoOR Collective with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The Cultural Meaning of the Cityhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH4W7yQqedY&ab_channel=Archite

[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 Na

[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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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?” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A rerun, and an update by The Architecture Foundation See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out 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 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.