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

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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

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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.”

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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.”

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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.“

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Geoff Manaugh is an architecture writer based in Los Angeles. He launched BLDGBLOG in 2004 and is the author most recently of The Burglar's Guide to the City (2016). "Ideas of things to research and rabbit holes to go down are not always in your discipline. Whether its anthropology or poetry or crime, these things that might change your life are everywhere, and they’re hiding in plain sight."

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Michael Maltzan is an architect based in Los Angeles. "I think it’s important to try to anticipate the city in the future […] to speculate about how scale and density is going to change, because architecture not only takes a long time to get built, but it exists for a long time as well, and it’s very likely that if you try to build a building that relates to a rapidly changing context, by the time it’s built it’s already out of scale – it’s already a part of the past […] The idea that we as architects have a responsibility to try and meet the scale, the relationships and context in the future is something that is very difficult to talk about because we are trying to describe and anticipate a speculative vision of the city, but I think it’s incumbent in what we do”

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Natsai Audrey Chieza is Founding Director of Faber Futures, a multidisciplinary design agency operating at the intersection of nature, technology, and society.“I’m interested in futures, and I’m interested in how we actually structurally make changes that can bring forward futures that are more equitable. My approach is to, if you like, be what we think [the future] is. It is through this process of doing that you can better articulate how you think it could work. It is through the process of doing that you can actually build a network to make it work. This goes back to the decision to put the speculative aside and start just being it through practice. This became a necessary and strategic device to get shit done, because then you are in the lab, making and experimenting and someone is going to want to know more.”

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John Patkau is an architect based in Vancouver."I always seek out the opposite. I’ve always been interested in architects who are least like me – the ones who are most like me I find objectionable."

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Shumi Bose is an architecture teacher, curator and editor."[Curation] is the idea of taking care of a conversation. Whether that conversation is for students, for academic learning, or whether its for a conversation within a community, or within a broader public […] it’s a similar process of nurturing and selecting. So in that sense it feels like I’m doing the same thing - it’s the format that changes”

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