Scaffold

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, Fountain of Youth with Fabian Marti for the Campus Santé in Lausanne. In 2020, Truwant+Rodet+ won the renovation for the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris with the Parisian firm ASBR. In 2022, they won the competition for the renovation of the Stadium of Bulle.

This...

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 think architecture is for, and how they imagine their futures in it.

In these short conversations you get a strong impression of the...

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 best known for books that explore architecture in relation to broader cultural, technological, and existential themes. His notable works include What is Architecture? (1994), The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), Artificial Love (2003), and How to...

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 teaching, resulting in exhibitions that subvert traditional formats of display by abandoning the top-down dissemination of knowledge typical to University Galleries, sharing instead their more raw and unbridled enthusiasm for forging strange new...

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 agenda of this year’s exhibition, curated by the MIT professor and recent guest of this podcast, Carlo Ratti, seemed surprisingly muted and anodyne, calling for architects to marshal the quote intelligence of...

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 consciousness. Architecture, on the other hand—a cultural form that once stood for whole epochs—has in recent decades become anachronistic, divorced from the virtual world that increasingly holds us captive. 

Patrick’s trajec...

To mark the 25th Anniversary of the Tate Modern this week, the Architecture Foundation's Director Ellis Woodman speaks with two key figures behind the museum's conception: Nicholas Serota and Jacques Herzog.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play

Become an Architecture Foundation Patreon member and be a part of a growing coalition of architects and built environment professionals supporting our vital and independent work.  

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com...

Carlo Ratti is is an Italian architect, engineer and educator, and the curator of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale.

As the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale opens its doors, we speak with this year’s curator, Carlo Ratti—architect, engineer, and a leading thinker at the intersection of design, technology, and urbanism. Under the theme 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.', Ratti explores how new forms of intelligence—from machine learning to natural ecosystems—are transforming not just the spaces we build, but the tools and processes we use to conceive them. In this episode, he reflects on the Biennale's...

Michael Meredith is a co-founder with Hilary Sample of MOS, an architecture practice based in New York.

MOS is an acronym derived from Meredith and Sample, with the "O" serving as an abstract, connective element. The name, much like the practice itself and the cultural moment it emerged from in the early 2000s, captures a playful tension between irony and sincerity. It's a subtle nod toward global architectural giants like SOM or OMA, while genuinely embodying Michael and Hilary's playful and collaborative spirit.

A hallmark of Meredith and Sample’s work is their ab...

This episode was originally aired in Novemebr 2022.

"The direction in which I’m going is never fixed. Because I don’t know where I’m going, I’m very able to change direction. . . only at the very end of the process does all this nascent information suddenly have resonance – only in the singularity of the final work does the impact of this desperate journey make any sense." – Tacita Dean.

Tickets are now available for Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – a landmark panel taking place on 2 June at the Barbican Concert Hall.

Suppo...

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 the contemporary museum from an African perspective. 

This week we speak with Seun Oduwole, who lead the design of the John Randle Centre. Oduwole is a Nigerian architect and th...

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 glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film—to interrogate concepts of cultural heritage and public space, particularly within the Middle East and Palestine. Her collaborative approach involves working closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers. ​

In 2016, Srouji founded...

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, which Alison developed during her time as a Rome scholar in architecture, examines the outskirts of that city to highlight small-scale, user-led interventions shape the built environment outside formal planning processes. 

The se...

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 discourse today.

Instead, the few projects that badweather has completed — lightweight and ephemeral constructions made from off the shelf components, primarily for nightclubs and festivals — reflect a generation of architects who, in an era de...

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 hand, understanding that it’s more about discovering than inventing. We’re interested in bringing meaning to a building from the components that are essential to it." – G...

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 for more information.

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. earlier this year a range of entries was added by Jones alongside a new generation of authors, and it was on this occasion that we met to talk about the guide book’s legacy and...

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 by the Swiss Embassy in the UK.

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

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. 

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play

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

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, at the same time, to the design of gardens and landscapes. In 1991, she founded Inside Outside. The studio worked in a multitude of creative areas, including textile, landscape and exhibition design. From 1999 Blaisse invited specialist...

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 architecture programme coordinator. It also features a panel discussion with Stefanie Everaert (Doorzon & Stand van Zaken), Serban Ionescu, Ambra Fabi and Giovanni Piovene (Piovenefabi).

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

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 Architecture Biennale.

“[Teaching architecture] doesn’t work when you don’t have real problems, and so this is the strategy we find most useful for us right now: leave the university, leave the instituti...

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:

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 2023 at Benk and Bo in Aldgate, London.

An upcoming live panel, titled "The Rights of the Architectural Worker" takes place on the evening of Tuesday 25 June at the Barbican Centre, with speakers Bob Allies...

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 Action, that has been staged by FJK3 Contemporary Art Space in Vienna.

Special thanks this week to Crispin Kelly / Baylight Properties for their support.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...

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 the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or Google Play

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

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 that’s why I admire architects so much, because they have the patience and the care to see a project through. I think there’s a lot the we in the critical, curatorial, discursive world have to learn f...

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 that religion there were other religions, and so it’s about stepping outside of that world and seeing what else is possible.”

Scaffold is an A...

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 production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

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

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 lack of a specific aesthetic narrative."

Episode References: 

John Habraken – frameworks of mass support

Lucien Kroll

Frei Otto

Francesc Rius – Coll De...

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 these kinds of chaotic and raw situations, how does architecture survive?" 

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

Download the London Archite...

“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, studied at the University of Toronto before moving to London in 1988, where he worked for for David Chipperfield, before establishing his own practice in 1996. He is best known for his wor...

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’s a social practice – there has to be room for the idea that the actual devices you use to engage with activist work can literally be construction, space and architectu...

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 so you travel into another world." – HUO

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.

Download the London Architecture Guide App...

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 of experience for people”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

Download the London Architecture Guide App via the...

Rural Urban Framework is a research and design collaborative based at the University of Hong Kong, directed by Joshua Bolchover and John Lin.

Conducted as a non-profit organization designing for charities and NGOs working in China, RUF has built over 15 projects in various villages in China including schools, community centers, hospitals, village houses, bridges, and incremental planning strategies. 

Of course, much has changed in China since John and Joshua began their practice - the rural to urban migration emblematic of china’s development over the past several decades is now reversing following changes in...

Tosin Oshinowo is a Lagos-based architect and curator of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.

Titled "The beauty of Impermanence, an Architecture of Adaptability," this year’s triennial considers design solutions built from conditions of scarcity and explores how this might impact sustainable design today. 

This interview was recorded in Sharjah during the opening weekend of the Triennial in mid November 2023, and the conversation began by addressing the triennial itself, before unfolding into a more personal discussion of the contradictions that emerge between the exhibition and Oshinowo's practice.

---

Boo...

RESOLVE is the Croydon-based collective practice of Akil Scafe-Smith, Seth Scafe-Smith and Melissa Haniff.

“We want people to look at our work and think: “I could do that” - if it means it doesn’t look amazing, and it can’t go on dezeen, so be it. There has to the mark of people on these structures, and the mistakes of people too. That is a fundamental part of our work.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.

Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google...

Scaffold is on holiday this week – instead here's an interview with the IG architecture meme account Dank Lloyd Wright recorded last year for the podcast Power and Public Space, co-produced by Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation.

A new Scaffold interview with Resolve Collective will air in two weeks ✌️

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

Theo de Meyer is an architect based in Ghent whose work moves between architecture, design and the arts. He and doorzon interieur architecten together represent the core of the modular collective Stand Van Zaken (‘State of Affairs’), who create furniture and architecture in collaboration with specialists in various fields. 

Special thanks this week to the General Representation of Flanders to the UK (Embassy of Belgium) for their support.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

Download the London Architecture Guide App via the App Store or on Google Play<...