Architecture Foundation

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Canal • 3 podcasts

Design

Design

06/07/2022
Design

Design

Quinzenal
Design

Design

Semanal

13/11/2025

playbody

Today’s episode considers a part of the built environment that’s often overlooked in architectural discourse, yet has become one of the most vibrant sites of experimentation in recent years: the nightclub. Since the post-COVID resurgence of nightlife, we’ve seen club spaces music festivals become laboratories again — places where architects, artists and designers, artists test how bodies move, gather, and connect. After years of enforced separation, there’s been a renewed appetite for intimacy, tactility, and collective presence. Nightclubs have stepped into that space, foregrounding not just sound and spectacle, but how architecture can invite touch, trust, and new forms of social closeness. There are few people exploring that frontier more boldly than today’s guests: Thea Arde and Joel Jjio, the duo behind playbody. Playbody is far more than a club night — it’s an ongoing design research project that treats the dancefloor as a site of architectural inquiry. Their events incorporate sculptural objects, spatial interventions, and choreographic prompts that encourage people to rediscover their own physicality in relation to others. In a time when digital life keeps pulling us apart, their work asks a simple but radical question: how can design rebuild social intimacy? Today we’ll talk about how playbody grew from a nightlife concept into a design studio, how they prototype through parties, and why they see the club as a critical testing ground for the future of spatial practice. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. Support our work by becoming a member on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

13/11/2025

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1h10min
19/12/2024

Gonçalo André Pires

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." – GAP Show notes: “Modern architects have been harping continually on what is different in our time to such an extent, that even they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is always essentially the same”“Modern architects have been harping continually on what is different in our time to such an extent, that even they have lost touch with what is not different, with what is always essentially the same” Aldo Van Eyck, first published in the Team Ten Primer, late 1950s John Young’s apartment Jaques Herzog, House for an Art Collector Architecture and the Sciences by Antoine Picon (2003) The Savage Mind by Claude Levi Strauss (1962) Mechanisation Takes Command by Siegfried Gideon (1948) Salome Lamas (contemporary Portuguese filmmaker) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

19/12/2024

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56min
05/11/2025

Metropolitan

In the first of a series of five podcasts marking OMA’s 50th Birthday, Richard Hall is joined by Lara Schrijver and Pier Paolo Tamburelli to discuss the eponymous idea of Metropolitan Architecture upon which the office was founded. OMA at 50 is produced by Richard Hall and presented by the Architecture Foundation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

05/11/2025

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50min
09/10/2025

Why be an architect today?

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 perennial motivations that push people toward careers in shaping the built environment, despite the seemingly diminishing returns of practicing architecture today. Speaking with these students about their convictions give us a lot of hope: that the culture of architecture today, its perceived importance in society, and the esteem it’s held in, might still be elevated, and remain worthy of the ambition and altruism that is clearly in no short supply in this incoming generation. Special thanks this week to all the summer school students, and to Claire Pollock / AHMM Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

09/10/2025

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15min
20/01/2022

55: Max Creasy

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

20/01/2022

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50min
01/05/2025

Michael Meredith

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 ability to balance intentional imperfection with technical precision. They've described their practice as embracing a philosophy that's "horizontal and fuzzy," deliberately moving away from the conventional "tall and shiny" image typically associated with architecture firms. It's a metaphor reflecting their preference for an architecture that's smaller, less bureaucratic, more experimental, and ultimately more alive. Michael's podcast Building with Writing Stan Allen: https://open.spotify.com/show/7CUtD3SnpyKxWUmsNnDmSw Michael's 2025 Princeton Syllabus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aU1IqdLYJmcldMAzgnxrwOczO1TIrTtCejEziyxZ4-U/edit?tab=t.0 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/privacy for more information.

01/05/2025

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1h49min
20/12/2025

Floris van der Poel's Favourite Things

Floris van der Poel comes on the pod this week to talk about the best work he’s discovered over the past year. Project list (in order of discussion): 1 The rounding of Cape Horn by Charlie Dalin. 2 Atelier Scheidegger Keller + Espazium, Areal Rosengarten Housing, Zurich, 2021 3 Emmanuel Héré de Corny's Palais du Gouvernement from the years 1751-1753 4 Meat cuts, comparing French and American tastes in urbanism 5 Model of an apartment building with 68 units in Tirana by Arquitectura G 6 Volante, housing in Hilversum by Monadnock Architects (2025) 7 Zwhatt housing, Regensdorf 2024. Luetjens Padmanabhan 8 770 Park Avenue, designed by Rosario Candela. 9 Logements Beaunier by Minuit Architecture 10-11 Papieri-Areal, Construction Site B Studio Eschrickenbacher 12-13 Bois-Gentil Housing, 1st Prize — Fruehauf, Henry, Viladoms 14 Door handle — LCLA 15 Ny Østergade, Copenhagen by Praksis Arkitekter 16-17 Office Complex in Hamburg, 2025 by Kawahara Krause Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

20/12/2025

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1h2min
12/05/2025

Jacques Herzog & Nicholas Serota with Ellis Woodman

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/privacy for more information.

12/05/2025

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59min
31/07/2025

Paul Shepheard

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 Like Everything (2013). His most recent book, and the focus of our interview, is called Autobiography, which was published in 2024 by Canalside press. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

31/07/2025

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1h5min
06/07/2022

Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue

Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of the Second World War. In March 2022, as Russian forces attempted to take Kyiv, missiles once again struck the land near the mass grave. The attack was likely an attempt to destroy Kyiv’s largest TV tower, and five civilians were killed. While not the deadliest missile strike to hit Kyiv, it was perhaps the most symbolic. In this episode Manuel Herz discusses the historic implications of the Russian attack. He also explains the approach his practice took to memorializing the Babyn Yar atrocity, which in place of the heavy, fixed structures associated with holocaust memorials, proposes a light and transformative place of worship and public exchange. Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

06/07/2022

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17min

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