Scaffold is back this week, with an episode that asks a simple question: why be an architect today?

The Architecture Foundation is based inside the office of AHMM in Clerkenwell, which, back in July, hosted a summer school for teenagers just beginning to explore architecture.

We decided to speak with some of them, to try and understand what draws young people to this profession today, what they think architecture is for, and how they imagine their futures in it.

In these short conversations you get a strong impression of the perennial motivations that push people toward careers in shaping the built environment, despite the seemingly diminishing returns of practicing architecture today.

Speaking with these students about their convictions give us a lot of hope: that the culture of architecture today, its perceived importance in society, and the esteem it’s held in, might still be elevated, and remain worthy of the ambition and altruism that is clearly in no short supply in this incoming generation.

Special thanks this week to all the summer school students, and to Claire Pollock / AHMM

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Paul Shepheard is a British architect and writer known for his philosophical and multidisciplinary approach to architecture. Shepheard was a student at the Architectural Association in the 1960’s, and has worked both in practice, for the likes of James Gowan, and in academia, teaching at institutions like the AA, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Kingston School of Art.

As a writer, he is best known for books that explore architecture in relation to broader cultural, technological, and existential themes. His notable works include What is Architecture? (1994), The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), Artificial Love (2003), and How to Like Everything (2013). His most recent book, and the focus of our interview, is called Autobiography, which was published in 2024 by Canalside press. 

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Recorded live from the Kontextur Podcast Festival at Khaus in Basel, this episode features a conversation with the curator Fredi Fischli.

Fredi Fischli, along with Niels Olsen, is co-curator and co-director of exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Together with Niels, Fredi works on projects at the intersection of architecture, art, research and teaching, resulting in exhibitions that subvert traditional formats of display by abandoning the top-down dissemination of knowledge typical to University Galleries, sharing instead their more raw and unbridled enthusiasm for forging strange new connections. resulting in such exhibitions as Unbeautiful museum (curated with Geraldine Tedder), Cloud’ 68. Collection of Radical Architecture, Home. A User’s Manual among many others.

Special thanks this week to Katharina Benjamin and everyone on the Kontextur team, including Angelika Hinterbrandner

Patrick Martin Rosa Thoneick and Laura Bertelt.

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A month after the opening of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, we've invited three critics to come on the show to help make sense of what was arguably one of the most content overloaded, and curitorially ambiguous biennales in recent memory.

Since its inception in 1980, The Venice architecture biennale has set the tone for global discourse on contemporary design and urbanism, and yet the agenda of this year’s exhibition, curated by the MIT professor and recent guest of this podcast, Carlo Ratti, seemed surprisingly muted and anodyne, calling for architects to marshal the quote intelligence of the natural, artificial and collective”

Still there are more complex although perhaps unintended themes to the biennale this year, including the emerging relationship between unaccountable technologies and authoritarianism, quantatitve expansion as a proxy for genuine inclusivity, and perhaps most importantly, the exchange of an independent curatorial vision for an apparent new ideal of algorithmically determined experience. 

Furter reading:

• Emily Conklin: We Will Rest: Seeking Resistance and Recovery During Carlo Ratti’s Venice Biennale in the Brooklyn Rail
• Fabrizio Gallanti: "Fakery and deception is everywhere at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025" in Dezeen
• Phin Harper: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 Review: A Tech Bro Fever Dream in Art Review and La Biennale Architettura: A Beginner’s Guide on The Fence.

Emily Conklin is the former managing editor of the Architect's Newspaper and is an editor and critic based in New York City. She is trained as a historic preservationist and is the founder of Tiny Cutlery studio. 

Fabrizio Gallanti is an architect, writer and curator, and directs Arc en Rêve, an architectural center in Bordeaux.

Phin Harper is a critic, curator, and sculptor and former Chief Executive of Open City.

Correction: the list of Swiss Pavilion curators mentioned in this episode mistakenly omitted Myriam Uzor, who led the project alongside Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins amd Axelle Stiefel.

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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.

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To mark the 25th Anniversary of the Tate Modern this week, the Architecture Foundation's Director Ellis Woodman speaks with two key figures behind the museum's conception: Nicholas Serota and Jacques Herzog.

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.  

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Carlo Ratti is is an Italian architect, engineer and educator, and the curator of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale.

As the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale opens its doors, we speak with this year’s curator, Carlo Ratti—architect, engineer, and a leading thinker at the intersection of design, technology, and urbanism. Under the theme 'Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.', Ratti explores how new forms of intelligence—from machine learning to natural ecosystems—are transforming not just the spaces we build, but the tools and processes we use to conceive them. In this episode, he reflects on the Biennale's curatorial vision, and the questions it raises about architecture’s evolving role in an increasingly interconnected world.

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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.  

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This episode was originally aired in Novemebr 2022.

"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." – Tacita Dean.

Tickets are now available for Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence – a landmark panel taking place on 2 June at the Barbican Concert Hall.

Support our work by becoming a Patreon Member or Practice Supporter

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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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