Late last year a new museum opened its doors in Lagos, Nigeria, called The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History. It is among a new generation of African cultural institutions – including the Bet Bi museum in Senegal, by Mariam Kamara, and the Museum of West African Art in Benin City by Adjaye Associates – which in different ways attempts to reimagine both the form and format of the contemporary museum from an African perspective. 

This week we speak with Seun Oduwole, who lead the design of the John Randle Centre. Oduwole is a Nigerian architect and the Principal Architect at SI.SA, a Lagos-based firm he founded in 2015. He earned his architecture degree from the University of Nottingham and gained experience at Hopkins & Partners, Benoy, and Sheppard Robson. Upon returning to Nigeria, he worked at Shelter Design Partnership and later became a partner at Brown inQ before establishing SI.SA. ​

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Dima Srouji is a Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher born in 1990 in Nazareth. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Kingston University (2012) and a Master of Architecture from the Yale School of Architecture (2016). ​

Srouji's interdisciplinary practice explores the ground as a repository of cultural narratives and potential collective healing. She employs various media—including glass, text, archives, maps, plaster casts, and film—to interrogate concepts of cultural heritage and public space, particularly within the Middle East and Palestine. Her collaborative approach involves working closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, sound designers, and glassblowers. ​

In 2016, Srouji founded Hollow Forms, a glassblowing initiative in collaboration with the Twam family in Jaba’, Palestine, aiming to revitalize traditional glassblowing techniques. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, the Sharjah Art Biennial, the Islamic Art Biennial in Jeddah, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Her pieces are part of permanent collections at institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Victoria & Albert Museum. ​

Srouji has contributed to academic discourse through her writings in publications like The Architectural Review and The Avery Review. She currently leads the MA City Design studio at the Royal College of Art in London, focusing on archaeological sites in Palestine as contexts for urban analysis. ​

In recognition of her contributions to art and architecture, Srouji was awarded the Jameel Fellowship at the Victoria & Albert Museum for 2022-2023. ​Through her multifaceted work, Srouji challenges conventional narratives, offering new perspectives on cultural heritage and identity within contested spaces.​

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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. 

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Scaffold was recently noted as one of the top feedspot architecture podcasts.

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badweather, founded by Oli Brenner, Sophie Mei Birkin and Leo Sixsmith in 2019, are an architecture and scenography collective based in London.

badweather’s work represents a strand of contemporary practice that became more visible in the wake of the pandemic, and one distinct from the climate survivalism, social moralism, and poetic despair that has come to dominate much of architectural discourse today.

Instead, the few projects that badweather has completed — lightweight and ephemeral constructions made from off the shelf components, primarily for nightclubs and festivals — reflect a generation of architects who, in an era defined by scarcity and polarization, are seeking aesthetic exuberance and new forms of collectivity precisely while contending with the limitations of the present. 

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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) 

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Art writer and former Spike columnist Dean Kissick stops by the pod to discuss his most recent article "The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art" – published in the December 2024 issue of Harper's.

Read Dean's article here.

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Edward Jones is the co-author, along with the late Christopher Woodward, of the Guide to the Architecture of London, which, originally published in 1983, is now in its fifth edition and has become the definitive guide book of the subject. In 2017 the guide book became the basis of an app - called the London architecture Guide, and one of the Architecture Foundation’s most ambitious projects. earlier this year a range of entries was added by Jones alongside a new generation of authors, and it was on this occasion that we met to talk about the guide book’s legacy and its evolution. 

“What matters hugely to me is that architecture has a role to play in public life. That’s what this book is about - to celebrate excellence in architecture, and to be somewhat critical of things we don’t argee with…there should be a debate about architecture in the city” – Edward Jones

Show notes: 

Arcades, the history of a building type by Geist, Johann Friedrich (1983)

College City, Colin Rowe (1978)

John Rocque's map of London, Westminster and Southwark (1746)

London The Unique City by Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1934)

Gilbey House, Serge Chermayeff, London, 1937

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

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

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dorsa is a collective architecture practice founded by Yufei He, James Horkulak and Pan Hu in 2021. In their own words, they "seek to capture multiple and parallel realities concealed within our time, and employ whichever medium necessary to create optimistic narratives for an empathic future."

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This episode was generously supported by the Swiss Embassy in the UK.

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This episode was recorded live at the Barbican Centre's Frobisher Auditorium on 25 June 2024, with panelists Bob Allies of Allies and Morrison; Charlie Edmonds of the grassroots activist group Future Architects Front; Cristina Gaidos + Maia Rollo of the recently formed union Section of Architectural Workers; and Jane Issler Hall + Owen Lacey of the the architecture collective Assemble. 

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

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

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Petra Blaisse is a designer and founding partner of Inside / Outside.

Blaisse started her career in 1978 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in the Department of Applied Arts. From 1986 onwards, she worked as freelance exhibition designer and won distinction for her installations of architectural works. Gradually her focus shifted to the use of textiles, light and finishes in interior space and, at the same time, to the design of gardens and landscapes. In 1991, she founded Inside Outside. The studio worked in a multitude of creative areas, including textile, landscape and exhibition design. From 1999 Blaisse invited specialist of various disciplines to work with her and currently the team consists of about ten people of different professions and nationalities.

A new monograph of Blaisse's work, called Art Applied, was published earlier this year by MACK. Edited and introduced by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, with newly commissioned texts by Penelope Curtis, Christophe Girot, Rem Koolhaas, Charlotte Matter, Fatma Al Sehlawi, Jack Self, Laurent Stalder, Helen Thomas, and Philip Ursprung.

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