Scaffold

Farshid Moussavi is an architect and educator based in London. "I’m interested in buildings, not architects. The building is independent once the architect is gone, and that’s when the building becomes a more open and detached from notions of representation. I would say buildings are closer to how people understand contemporary art today. The interesting thing about art is precisely the fa that is is so polysemic - we stand in front of a piece of art and we will all take away different things from it, and I think buildings perform in a similar way."

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Charlotte Cooper is a Psychotherapist, Cultural Worker and Fat Activist. “The therapy I do, and maybe therapy in general enables people to think about their lives in ways they hadn’t considered before. It’s about illuminating the dusty corners that they may have forgotten or overlooked, and showing them that there may be value in those places. […] We are in society, and we’re bound by the tensions and rules of society, but there's still a lot of space for agency and choice within those strictures.”This episode originally aired on 7 March 2018.

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Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum in London “A friend of mine once said to me no magazine you’ll ever want to read will ever sell more than 8000 copies a month […] What was startling to find is that, when Zaha Hadid was by no means the establishment we did a show with her in my early days at the Design Museum, which sold 75,000 tickets. No book on architecture would ever sell that many copies - and it’s interesting what it is that makes this physical experience work in ways which text doesn’t.” This episode was recorded as part of the Architecture Foundation's Dodecanalle Summit in April 2019.

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David Kohn is an architect based in London. “The contemporary economies of architectural production inevitably tend toward the shed. The shed is this panacea - everything can be a shed. […] We can now build these vast, expansive structures, and the idea is that they’re kind of good for everything but in fact they rob everyone of all of these other spaces that allow you to be sociable in many more ways [….] We all need this, we need spaces where you can sit with a couple of other people and enjoy a meal or a drink.”

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Omer Arbel is an architect and industrial designer based in Vancouver.“When I talk about the receding of ego in my work, that is the method - I encourage materials to teach me, but there’s obviously an editorial moment in that process where I want a specific aesthetic extreme to emerge […] What I hope to do here in our practice is make work that has a cultural relevance to this very strange moment in time now. If we are rigorous to this time and place in human history, then we make work that is culturally relevant and has a longevity simply because of the fidelity it has to the zeitgeist.”

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Mary Duggan was a founding partner of Duggan Morris Architects, and established Mary Duggan Architects in 2017. “I think [architects] are obsessed with justification, but sometimes in architecture you can’t explain everything. Lots of architects, and I’m not one of them, find an amazing historic building and want to pull it apart to understand it, and want that understanding of it to inform their work, and I just don’t think you need that all the time. I think we’ve forgotten we’re intuitive - that you can go to a site and decide quite instantly what it should be.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how.

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John ‘Sinx’ Sinclair is a founding partner of the digital product design studio ustwo. “It’s the functionality of something rather than the aesthetics of something that pleases me. Software lends its benefit to that because you can iterate and change. It’s not about just launching [a product] in one big go, but about identifying challenges and making incremental improvements.”

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Lütjens Padmanabhan are an architecture practice based in Zurich. “How do you deal with the cheapening of the building, where the value and architectural significance of the building was once based on monolithic weight and closed form, a lack of open joints, a kind of illusion of truthful construction […] When we liberate ourselves from that dogma we can open up towards all kinds of more complex ideas of the relationship between construction and truth.”◣ Support Scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how.

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Tom Emerson is a founding director of 6a architects. “One of the positions that [my teaching] takes is to not distinguish between architecture - the constructed world - and nature […] Somehow to look at the weeds, and the gravel and the rubble, and the forest and the city as equivalent, without hierarchy.They are the environment, they’re the only one we’ve got, and all of them need to be looked after.”◣ Support scaffold: visit https://www.patreon.com/scaffold to find out how.

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Anna Mill and Luke Jones are authors of the graphic novel Square Eyes. “The future city still has to get designed somehow, and augmented reality is not settled - they need more ideas. In terms of speculative design as a pursuit [...] there’s a positive need for it, but to find a way of doing it that has critical integrity”

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