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

Ep 49: Esther Choi

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

Ep 48: Sound Advice (Joseph Zeal Henry & Pooja Agrawal

Beka & Lemoine are documentary filmmakers based in Italy. “The question of fragmentation of thought and narration, which has necessarily an impact on the way you understand completeness and objectivity […] these are topics that we had developed over the years in the various films we’ve made as a basis of principles on which we’ve built up our methodology […] of looking for the most subjective, the most fragile position in what we defend, rather than copying that absurd tone of objectivity that you find in most architecture films.” ◣ Support scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how.

Ep 47: Bêka & Lemoine

Alvaro Barrington is an artist working in New York and London. “In terms of cultural production, I do think that the erasure that has happened to women, to people of colour, we have to work against that, because it creates a space where people feel lesser than because they don’t feel like they have contributed to the conversation when that is far from the truth, and then it also creates a space where white men feel more entitled to invention even though they haven’t been more inventive than any other race…and so it creates two sorts of violence within people - one feeling lesser than, and then one where white men maybe feel inadequate because they’re not as great as this other white man, and so that anxiety plays out in their head. Because we have created these false narratives we see all of this internalised violence, and I do think it’s our generation’s thing to maybe start correcting that truth.”

Ep 46: Alvaro Barrington

Neri & Hu are an architecture and design practice based in Shanghai    “The right projects aren’t defined by fees at all […] the right projects are defined by their potential to bring breakthroughs. Our fear is the lack of time, and the risk of losing ourselves and our own vision amidst all this busyness” Support this podcast to help sustain future episodes: visit Patreon.com/Scaffold

Ep 45: Neri&Hu

This special episode of Scaffold features a conversation with Ellis Woodman and Rosie Gibbs-Stevenson of the Architecture Foundation. For 100 days from April to August, the AF put on a series of nearly 300 lectures, interviews, building tours and panel discussions, handing over the virtual stage to a diverse cast of practitioners from all over the world, from Alvaro Siza to Yasmeen Lari, Kate Macintosh to Jack Self, all hosted virtually and free to view on youtube. In this conversation Ellis and Rosie reflect on the 100 Day Studio and the possibilities it has opened up for architectural discourse. Visit architecturefoundation.org.uk for more information and upcoming events, and consider becoming a member or making a donation.

Episode 44: The 100 Day Studio

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 dependance 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.”

Ep 43: Sara Hendren

Chris Dorley Brown is a photographer living and working in London I suspect that [I’m documenting] what you might call the last days of the civil contract between state and people. I get worried that the post war optimism […] exemplified by architecture - I’m talking about public buildings and public spaces that are built for no other reason than to help us, maybe a library or a block of flats, they weren’t put there for any particular profit or gain – that’s the contract that I feel I’m witnessing the end of. There’s been a breach somewhere along the line, and I spend my days looking for the remnants of it still in existence.

Ep 42: Chris Dorley Brown

Cia Rinne is an artist, writer and poet I don’t want to think about the audience while I’m writing, and I’m not excluding anybody voluntarily – nothing could be further from my thinking – but this kind of poetry work will probably not help people … and you don’t have any control [over whom it will reach] anyway. […]I don’t think that [poetry] is made to serve the public - I think that is the wrong ends to start with - I’m really starting from the work, and the fact that if I like it maybe someone else will too. And that’s good. You don’t know what to expect, and I don’t want to control that or have expectations - I think that’s the best starting point.

Ep 41: Cia Rinne

Adam Caruso is an architect and co-director of Caruso St. John "[When we started our practice] we were really interested in the syntax of architecture - how you make a brick wall, how you make an opening - and we believed that the syntax of architecture held within it the culture of architecture. And the reason we concentrated on that rather than the semiotics of architecture is that we didn’t believe so much in a shared language [for architecture to speak symbolically]. We live in a society that’s diverse and globalised, and I’m trying to find positive ways of engaging with those things”

Ep 40: Adam Caruso

This special episode of Scaffold features a conversation between architect Mabel O. Wilson and Dario Calmese, host of the new podcast Institute of Black imagination. “We could be a very equitable society, it's just the will is not there. We have the resources — I don’t think its a project of inclusion, I think we have to radially change the system. If we have to destroy it and rebuild it, so be it. But I don’t think including us in the current system — it wipes us out, it’s not sustaining for us.” - Mabel O Wilson

Ep 39: Mabel O. Wilson with Dario Calmese (Institute of Black Imagination)

Janina Gosseye is a scholar and co-editor, with Naomi Stead and Deborah Van der Plat, of the recently published Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research. “Architecture has long been dominated by elites, mostly western and male, and its historiography has often been dictated by what these individuals have to say about buildings. Speaking of Buildings seeks to open up the conversation, to shed light on those who have been silenced in architectural history or on those who have remained unheard” This interview was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation’s 100 Day Studio: https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/news/100-day-studio

Ep 38: Janina Gosseye

David Leech is an architect based in London. I don’t have ‘big ideas’ [in my work] - and if I do, I do everything I can to undermine them. I do not want a project to be read in one sentence, or understood in one sentence […] we don’t judge anything else like that - people are much more complex, and I think buildings are much more complex.”

Ep 37: David Leech

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 more and more work on fabric and less and less monument, and there’s more and more contingencies and we’re more aware of the world, that kind of curiosity and that sincerity is useful right now.”

Ep 36: Andrew Clancy

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.“

Ep 35: Francesca Torzo

Fortnightly interviews with architects, artists & designers.

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