Interviews With Architects, Artists & Designers

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 conversation, to shed light on those who have been silenced in architectural history or on those who have remained unheard”This interview was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation’s 100 Day Studio: https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/news/100-day-studio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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 location […] It allows architects to act with territorial intent, with great sincerity, and with no attempt at cynicism or anything like that […] I think that as the world moves to being one where people do more and more work on fabric and less and less monument, and there’s more and more contingencies and we’re more aware of the world, that kind of curiosity and that sincerity is useful right now.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.“ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 it’s built it’s already out of scale – it’s already a part of the past […] The idea that we as architects have a responsibility to try and meet the scale, the relationships and context in the future is something that is very difficult to talk about because we are trying to describe and anticipate a speculative vision of the city, but I think it’s incumbent in what we do” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 of doing that you can better articulate how you think it could work. It is through the process of doing that you can actually build a network to make it work. This goes back to the decision to put the speculative aside and start just being it through practice. This became a necessary and strategic device to get shit done, because then you are in the lab, making and experimenting and someone is going to want to know more.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 is so polysemic - we stand in front of a piece of art and we will all take away different things from it, and I think buildings perform in a similar way." See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 and rules of society, but there's still a lot of space for agency and choice within those strictures.”This episode originally aired on 7 March 2018. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 copies - and it’s interesting what it is that makes this physical experience work in ways which text doesn’t.” This episode was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation's Dodecanalle Summit in April 2019. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 ways [….] We all need this, we need spaces where you can sit with a couple of other people and enjoy a meal or a drink.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 in time now. If we are rigorous to this time and place in human history, then we make work that is culturally relevant and has a longevity simply because of the fidelity it has to the zeitgeist.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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 ideas of the relationship between construction and truth.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 after.”◣ Support scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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