Scaffold

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.

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Book tickets for upcoming Architecture on Stage lectures by Duncan Lewis (Tuesday November 21st) and Sam Chermayeff with Jack Self (Wednesday November 29th).

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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.

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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 ✌️

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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

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Tony Fretton founded his eponymous architecture practice in 1982. His early work in London, including the Lisson Gallery (1986-1992), was influential in defining a new approach to architecture focused on urban context and daily life.

“By the time I graduated, London was completely different. It wasn’t opulent, it was poor, and punk was an attitude that accepted the nihilism of the state and of the city. All those songs by the Sex Pistols, they rang true, they weren’t just inventions. Punk was really important to me - punks were ethical, they had an idea of the world and it was about make and mend, about living in the margins, and that was the background from which I developed my practice.” – TF

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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

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Tony Fretton founded his eponymous architecture practice in 1982. His early work in London, including the Lisson Gallery (1986-1992), was influential in defining a new approach to architecture focused on urban context and daily life.

“By the time I graduated, London was completely different. It wasn’t opulent, it was poor, and punk was an attitude that accepted the nihilism of the state and of the city. All those songs by the Sex Pistols, they rang true, they weren’t just inventions. Punk was really important to me - punks were ethical, they had an idea of the world and it was about make and mend, about living in the margins, and that was the background from which I developed my practice.” – TF

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Luke Jones and George Gingell are hosts of the podcast About Buildings and Cities.

"We’re interested in getting into things that are obscure [in architectural history], but we’re also interested in looking at things that are super obvious. […] Taking Gaudi for example, he’s the world’s favourite architect, and he’s also curiously elusive and totally unfashionable - like kitch embarrassing tea-towel stuff. At the same time, he is such a strange and virtuosic designer. We’re interested in trying to make sense of that thing that seems so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to talk about."

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Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology at Kings College London, and the son of the celebrated painter Frank Bowling, whose studio he now manages.

"Frank always wanted children, but did not want to be a father, because of his own father’s violence; by being an absent father through my infancy and childhood, Frank allowed me to re-write the script of fatherhood.

"One thing that is joyous about working in the studio is being able to involve my son, who’s now in his 30’s, and his son, who’s two and a half. The fact that we now have four generations of male Bowlings in the studio, coming together around the work, is a source of joy. It’s almost like we disrupted this old pattern of what fatherhood should be."

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Asli Çiçek is an Architect and writer based in Brussels, whose work focuses on scenography and exhibition design.

"Culture is not a luxury. I don’t like populistic discussions about what culture should be or how history should be flattened to a quick communication. I think it’s fantastic to not understand everything at once, to keep the fascination for history and culture alive in museums […] 

"There is no shame in having culture. If there’s a debate I silently follow, it’s that there is a necessity for culture in society – not only as an egalitarian concept, but as an educational concept. That is something I try to stand for."

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

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Charlotte Cooper is the author of Poundbury: a Queer Tour of Monarchy, published earlier this year by 33 Editions.

"One of my bugbears about Poundbury is that it’s not an honest place – it’s pretending to be something that it isn’t. They talk about how green it is, how it is invested in traditional building techniques, but it’s also breeze blocks, it’s plastic, it’s a great place to park your car […] My question is, if you could, what would bring the truth our of Poundbury, what would show it for what it is?"

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Robin Winogrond is a Landscape Architect based in Zurich.

"I try to never look at what I expect to see, but to see in a raw way, in an uninformed way, I try to read space and atmospheres in the most unschooled way I can, to soak up as much knowledge as I can." – RW

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Karin Templin is an architect, educator, and author of the book At Home in London: The Mansion Block, co-published by The Architecture Foundation and MACK.

This book is first in a series on types of London housing, reflecting on the place of the home in the city in the light of its longstanding housing crisis. To find out more visit mackbooks.co.uk

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This episode originally aired in April 2022.

Lesley Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute and curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

“I don’t see myself as being ‘the future’, but the expanded field [of architecture] that I’ve operated in for most of my life has given me something that is of use to he generation coming behind me, so that no matter how I end up making my living, I see myself first and foremost as a teacher.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. For more information visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/

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Sumayya Vally is a Musilm South African architect, and founder of the practice Counterspace.

“Architecture is abstract, and I think what I’m doing in my practice is making a concerted effort to find different sources for the origins of that abstraction. 

I think what has happened in the cannon and in the profession more broadly is that we’ve inherited so much that we don’t deeply question…I think the languages that we’ve inherited could do with being supplemented or oven being overtaken, dare I say, by other origins, that come from different ways of being and different value systems.”

– SV

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

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David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. 

His book, The Architecture of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” The Architecture of Disability offers a critical perspective on histories and futures of buildings, cities, and landscapes — beyond a sole focus on the problems of accessibility.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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b+ is a collaborative architecture practice that operates across different media and formats. The practice seeks to engage with challenges of eco-social transformation and adaptive reuse, and to contribute to the societal transformation with ecologically and economically viable answers.

“Why does the political right have better propaganda than the left? It’s perhaps because the right is situated in the 'no' – the 'yes' is much more difficult to propagandise. It’s therefore necessary to find positive claims that can be engaged with almost instantaneously – in a way, that’s the architectural project” 

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Julian Opie is an artist based in London.

We create models to deal with the world and to function in the world. It’s how we perceive the world and our own life and existence, drawing from the world a language that can then be shared and used to talk about existence – JO

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Carmody Groarke is an architecture practice based in London.

"This idea of thinness [of surfaces] has to do with pragmatism and thrift, but it's also a contemporary challenge of buildings – now that we've disassembled the monolithic way of traditional construction we have to consider the making of walls in a different way, and yet we enjoy that discipline of making the most with the least."

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Albert Williamson Taylor is a design engineer and founder of AKT II.

“The goal has always got to be the project – the design – everything else is just an inconvenience. Even deciding to start a practice was very much that. It’s a means to an end, and the end in my view is being able to contribute with your abilities, rather than what’s expected of you.” – AWT

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation podcast, produced by Matthew Blunderfield

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Albert Williamson Taylor is a design engineer and founder of AKT II.

“The goal has always got to be the project – the design – everything else is just an inconvenience. Even deciding to start a practice was very much that. It’s a means to an end, and the end in my view is being able to contribute with your abilities, rather than what’s expected of you.”  – AWT

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation podcast, produced by Matthew Blunderfield

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Thomas Demand is an artist working in Berlin and Los Angeles

"When architects look at my work it’s like when you show your work to your mother – she looks at something completely different than when you show your work to your peers. Architects are not “Mother”, but they see different aspects of my work than the art world do.”

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

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This episode was recorded in October of 2020, and originally aired in July of 2021.

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”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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This episode originally aired in October 2020

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Olin College of Engineering.

“Disability knocks at the foundations of individualism […] If needfulness is actually universal, and if slowness is also part of life, and if dependence is partly what makes us human, that actually changes everything in terms of our ideas about the social contract […] The giving and receiving of care is in all of our lives; I think we really do want a world where care is part of the landscape of existence.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Thomas Heatherwick is a designer and founder of Heatherwick Studio in London.

"I’m inspired by people who don’t try to impress other people in their profession [...] The people who really matter are the public who you are doing projects for. What actually matters, In the big picture of time, is what matters to the people around us." 

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

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Tacita Dean is a visual artist who works in Berlin and Los Angeles

"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."

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

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Sam Chermayeff is an architect based in Berlin.

"The success of all interiors are specifics – specific wobbles, specific things in the way, specific dirt behind the ears of a house […] It’s wildly inefficient way of designing […] and it can drive people crazy, but the notion that you can provide this joyous instability for people – I want to offer that to everyone."

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Nicholas Gardner and Saša Štucin founded the design practice Soft Baroque in 2013, and are currently based in Ljubljana.

“For us, the satisfaction of buying something pales in comparison to even pushing a button and hitting print on a 3D printer or hitting play on a CNC machine – there is a fascination that we have with making things work and making something in three dimensions [...] It feels like the type of urge that could replace our consumer desires.”

Link to Nicholas Gardner's tag poems

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, produced by Matthew Blunderfield.

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Richard Wentworth is an artist based in London.

"Without feeling sorry for myself, I feel like a bit of a misfit […] I don’t really have a tidy sense of where [I belong]. I want to be effective. I would be a bit bored if I died and no one ever mentioned me again – not because I want them to say “do you know he was such and such” – I’d like to be the grit in a lot of shoes, and I’d like that grit to be useful across quite a lot of subjects."

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project, produced by Matthew Blunderfield.

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Moshe Safdie is an architect based in Boston who first came to prominence through his Habitat 67 project, a modular housing prototype constructed for the Montreal Expo in 1967. Safdie's memoir, If Walls Could Speak, has just been published by Atlantic Books.

“It’s not that I avoid a signature style, I just allow things to mutate […] I marvel in the differences of place, and I bring them out and I enjoy them because I think that I’m making buildings that are more rooted. For me this is the pleasure of design.” 

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

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Deem Journal co-founders Nu Goteh, Alice Grandoit and Marquise Stillwell discuss an expanded definition of design as a social process.

“publishing is a ritual act of listening, and for us we’re really trying to orient ourselves to become better listeners, and to thus orient an audience to become better listeners, with the hope that through this listening we can arrive at a better ethics around our relationship to each other and the planet.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project.

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Flores & Prats are an architecture practice based in Barcelona.

“The theatre and the common spaces are the same experience. Going to the theatre is not getting into a room where you suddenly forget the outside world, going to the theatre is meeting your friend at the ticket box, at the sofa going the bar, have a beer, coffee, anxious, waiting to start, and meeting the actors, and everything is a continuity[…] The theatre has exploded to occupy the whole building, not just the two performance spaces.” 

Flores & Prats Website

@floresyprats

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

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Introducing Power & Public Space, a new podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation.

This episode features a conversation with professor Mabel O. Wilson on the Memorial to Enslaved Labourers at the University of Virginia. Listen to the full series on ITunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Scaffold returns with new episodes later this month.

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Max Pinckers is a photographer based in Brussels.

“The subject and themes [of my photographs] are a reflection of how I see photography, or how I want to deal with photography - the subject matter is always a mirror for the medium as well.” 

https://www.maxpinckers.be/

@maxpinckers

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

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Freek Persyn is professor of architecture and urban transformation at ETH in Zurich, and together with Johan Anrys and Peter Swinnen founded the practice 51N4E in 1998. 

“Architecture is not often talked about in terms of transience, its very much focusing always on the final product, and this final product is captured before its used - it’s trying to monumentalise or eternalise one fragment of time that doesn’t really even exist, which is the finished building before it is even in use […] I would say that instead, we are talking about this whole thing – this whole process of architecture – and valuing every moment of it."

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Carla Juacaba is a Brazilian architect based in London. 

“I’m compelled by theatre for its impermanence, that things end, in a way that it’s not even possible to record; it’s very fascinating to see things dissipating, then that’s it. When I worked in exhibition design I was already fascinated by how despite this temporary effect, ideas live on in our minds forever - architecture can be temporary but it remains a part of our imaginary world.”

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

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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.”

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Lesley Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute and curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

“I don’t see myself as being ‘the future’, but the expanded field [of architecture] that I’ve operated in for most of my life has given me something that is of use to he generation coming behind me, so that no matter how I end up making my living, I see myself first and foremost as a teacher.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. For more information visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/

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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

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Paloma Gormley is a founding director of both Practise Architecture and Material Cultures, bringing 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/

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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 Ishiyama

Terunobu Fujimori

Keisuke Oka

Other references: Genpei Aksegawa – Leader of "Rojo street observation society"

Ferdinand Cheval – architect of the "Ideal Palace"

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation project

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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:

videos:

Michael Maltzan & David Ogunmuyiwa with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The World and the City

RESOLVE and PoOR Collective with Nana Biamah-Ofosu: The Cultural Meaning of the City

Tom DiMaria and Matthew Higgs on the Work of William Scott

articles:

The Turner prize and the rise of neurodiverse art

Roberta Smith and Holland Carter - Best Shows of 2021

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