Interviews With Architects, Artists & Designers

James Taylor Foster is a writer and curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes. "When I think about curatorial practice I start to think about what it means to nest in the complexity of things […] There’s an ambition to not dumb things down, but to create space for close looking and close feeling, through experiences, through objects, and through the creation or maintenance of conversations” Interlude audio is from the youtube video [ASMR] Dark & Relaxing Tapping & Scratching [Close Whispers] by GibiASMR See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Paloma Gormley is a founding director of both Practise Architects and Material Cultures, a not-for-profit organisation which brings together design, research and action towards a post carbon built environment."There’s an inherent tension in the work that we’re trying to do, in that we’re trying to change the nature of authorship – there’s a real risk with the rise of technology, it follows that power, agency and authorship become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands […] One of the things that’s exciting about building with natural materials is that those technical barriers – which we’ve created with petrochemical culture and their associated layers of liability – in a way a lot of that ‘technification’ goes out the window, and you’re back to a much more straightforward way of doing things.”https://practicearchitecture.co.uk/https://materialcultures.org/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Takeshi Hayatsu is an architect based in London and founding director of Hayatsu Architects. “ …That sort of fear, and darkness beyond our control that exists in the natural world is something we’ve somehow forgotten following the modernist movement […] People tend to become arrogant – we assume we control everything – so animism and symbolism are things I’m interested in, in terms of finding ways to pay respect to nature, in a way that should really come back more now in the age of environmental crisis.”The "Red School" architects mentioned in this episode include: Takamasa Yoshizaka Yuko Saito Osamu IshiyamaTerunobu Fujimori Keisuke OkaOther references: Genpei Aksegawa – Leader of "Rojo street observation society" Ferdinand Cheval – architect of the "Ideal Palace" See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The European Prize for Urban Public Space is an observatory of European cities that recognises the best works to create, recover, transform and improve public spaces in Europe.Matthew recently spoke with the prize’s director, Judit Carrera, to find out more.Registration is open for submissions from 20 April to 17 May 2022. The conditions of entry and everything you need to know to take part in the Prize are available at www.publicspace.org See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode originally aired on 23 April 2020. It was recorded in person in at the Kingston School of Art in December of 2019. Clancy Moore architects have been nominated for a 2022 EU Mies Award, and will be presenting their work at the Barbican Centre on 23 March 2022 as part of the Architecture on Stage series. To book tickets visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/architecture-on-stage-clancy-moore---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 m

This episode originally aired on 9 April 2020. It was recorded in person in a noisy hotel cafe, so the audio quality is variable (it gets better after the first few minutes). It's one of my favourite conversations. If you haven't heard it yet, enjoy!- Matthew ---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.

Founded by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg, Space Popular is an experimental design practice that has made its name in exploring the architectural potential of digital space.“Architecture is a communication medium, and we believe that in our lifetimes we will be able to experience architecture at the speed of the spoken word; you will be able to create and experience space at the speed at which you form and communicate your own thoughts. It maybe seems scary, but we’re going to inch towards that slowly and once we are there, we will have an infinitely more productive way to communicate with each other.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ryan Scavnicky is an educator, architectural theorist and founder of the practice Extra Office. He's also been described as "the godfather of the architecture meme." “I think of theory way more as a practice and I think of criticism way more as a practice than as this thing that floats around in books – the theory is the feed; the theory is the hive mind meme page; the theory is the tiktok account – I think those are all bonafide methods of the production of contemporary architectural theory” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lee Ivett is an architect, educator and founder of the participatory architecture, art and design studio Baxendale – a practice best known for developing low-budget socially-led projects within communities across the UK.“For me, just being in a place and registering it through your own human experience – your own emotional experience, your own physical experience - I started to understand that that was far more informative, and that your own instinct, reactions and discomforts were far more informative, and actually could be a mode of research - a more empathic, situated, lived mode of research - than some of the more normative modes of analysis and research that you’d find in an architecture school.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.