Architecture Foundation

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Design

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Design

Design

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Design

Design

Updated 07/06/2022

3d ago

Holly Pester (Cafés)

Holly Pester comes on the pod this week to talk about her new book Cafés — a long poem described as both an elegy for communal space and a surreal meditation on the state of public life. Pester is also a novelist and senior lecturer at the University of Essex. Her first collection, Comic Timing, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and her debut novel, The Lodgers, came out in 2024. Cafés was published this summer by Fitzcarraldo, and has just been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. This interview was recorded at the University of Essex on a windy afternoon amidst the chaos of Freshers Week. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. This episode is sponsored by VELUX. [velux.com/design]. Image credit: Fitzcarraldo Editions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oct 23

Mary Duggan (May 2019)

Re-running this 2019 interview with Mary Duggan to celebrate her recent Stirling Prize win. Congrats Mary! Back again next week with a new episode. “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.” - MD Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Oct 16

Richard Wentworth (October 2022)

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Aug 7

Níall McLaughlin (Live at POST PRESS)

Níall McLaughlin is this year's recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal—awarded for more than three decades of work ranging from a seaside bandstand at Bexhill to the Stirling Prize-winning library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. To mark the occasion, his practice has released a new book, published by Objectif Edition and co-edited with Bryony Jones. And it's far from your typical architecture monograph.Uncle Toby's Garden, and it takes its title from Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne's mid-eighteenth-century novel—a book that seems to have arrived from the future, treating the conventions of the still-young English novel as toys to be dismantled, and anticipating experimental fiction by roughly two centuries. It tries to capture real experience, and the movement of consciousness, in a way that tidy, linear narrative can't. Níall's book is similarly non-linear, organised around digressions rather than buildings. Its title character, Uncle Toby, is a wounded veteran who spends his days re-enacting old battles on his bowling green, in a pastime both trivial and profound. In that spirit, the book reframes architecture as a performance of ritual, collaboration, speculation and play. Fittingly, our conversation took place at 10 Bowling Green Lane, home of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and the temporary site of the Architecture Foundation's summer programme, POST PRESS. It was recorded on Tuesday 21 July 2026. Link to Níall's lecture Circling a Star - a Daylight Talk: https://www.niallmclaughlin.com/media/circling-a-star-a-daylight-talk/ Thanks to Velux for supporting the podcast. Velux.com/design Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sep 11

John Tuomey

John Tuomey comes on the pod to discuss Middle Quarter, the second volume of his memoir, recorded live at the Barbican on 27 July 2026 as part of the Architecture Foundation's Architecture on Stage series. Tuomey co-founded O'Donnell + Tuomey with Sheila O'Donnell in 1988. Together they have built the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar, the Glucksman in Cork, the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Saw Swee Hock Student Centre at the LSE, and the V&A East in Stratford, and were jointly awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2015. The conversation traces a childhood spent moving every two years between his father's construction sites, an education at UCD in the wake of the Flying Circus, and a first job in James Stirling's office secured by a phone call at six on a Friday evening. Tuomey talks about returning to Dublin in the 1980s to work on a derelict city, the founding of Group 91 and the competition for Temple Bar, the shift from cellular to volumetric thinking at Letterfrack, and the pinball machine that gave the Irish language centre in Derry its plan. He is also candid about the years after the LSE when work dried up entirely, and about being retired from UCD on his birthday after four decades of teaching. Middle Quarter is published by Lilliput Press. First Quarter, the first volume, is also available. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. Special thanks to VELUX for supporting this episode: https://velux.com/design Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jun 12

Jonathan Tuckey

Jonathan Tuckey founded his design practice in 2000 having previously worked for David Chipperfield Architects and Fletcher Priest Architects. He has long been one of the UK's leading advocates for remodelling and radically transforming old buildings for modern uses. The podcast is supported this week by VELUX and features a short pre-reel interview with Thomas Vonier — architect and former president of the International Union of Architects. th UIA is assembling in Barcelona this month for the World Congress of Architects, which VELUX are also supporting. Jonathan's episode begins around the 12 minute mark. Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
05/01/2025

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.
02/13/2025

Alison Crawshaw

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 second project, called open Havelock, which was just recently completed, transforms undercroft garages in London’s Havelock Estate into a series of community rooms instead of demolishing them, in a bid to repurpose overlooked urban spaces. Both projects acknowledge the role of everyday users as co-creators of urban space, and push for a more adaptive, bottom-up approach to urbanism, suggesting grassroots tactics for future urban development. Support the Architecture Foundation by becoming (or gifting) a Patreon membership. More details here. Scaffold was recently noted as one of the top feedspot architecture podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
06/06/2025

Patrick McGraw (Heavy Traffic Magazine)

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 trajectory is interesting because he originally studied architecture before making a shift into journalism and eventually leading a literary magazine. In our conversation we try to bridge this gap between the world of architecture and fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
04/03/2024

Asif Khan (April 2022)

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 Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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