Scaffold

Barbara Penner is Professor in the Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture. "[My allegiance] is to feminism and always has been. What’s happened within feminist scholarship is that as the feminist perspective has become less controversial it’s gone underground slightly […] At a recent conference these questions were raised - are we now being too subtle and too implicit about our feminism? […] do we need to once again nail our colours to the mast and be very explicit about our feminism, how that shapes our scholarship, and so on? - that’s quite interesting because it implies that to adopt a certain political position there’s a kind of ethical responsibility to write in a particular way. That’s a kind of live debate - is that self-reflexivity inherent to being a feminist - which implies that there’s a certain rigidity there towards how you should be as a scholar. That moment really interests me - that you’re not just an individual scholar, you’re actually carrying the mantle, and that comes with a certain ethical set of choices that you make about your voice."

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OK-RM are a design studio working in the fields of art, culture and commerce. “'Graphic designer' is something that comes up a lot in this conversation and it’s almost something that we’re anti. We call ourselves a design practice mainly because we really love that idea that what we do could transcend any particular medium or discipline. It’s out of real respect - not for ulterior motives - only because we believe in a universality of design”

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Irénée Scalbert is an architecture critic and teacher based in London“What interests me is how architecture relates to experience […] this is the great question of architecture - how can one make something so intangible and inclusive as experience at home in something as rigid, as inflexible as architecture?”

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Stephen Bates is an architect and founding partner of Sergison Bates architects.“I enjoy the idea [in architecture] that you don’t always see everything immediately - that you have to look again and again, or be invited that bit further in, and a world is uncovered […] In a way that seems to be anti-Modernist, where transparency, borderlessness, threshold-freeness, a blurring of inside and outside, are all absolutely paramount."

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Andy Dixon is a painter based in Los Angeles.“I don’t want to come across like I’m making fun of the rich, or that I’m making fun of my patrons, if anything, I think I’m making fun of those artists who are perfectly willing to accept the money from these people but then pretend that they’re not part of the system. I find that really annoying, and a little dishonest, really - artists who feel it’s taboo to talk about the fact that they are entangled in a world of luxury”

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Jack Self is an architect and writer. He is the founding director of the Real Foundation and editor in chief of the Real Review.“The subjectivity of the white middle class heterosexual male - you know, that’s what the 20th century was about. And when they spoke about Modernism that’s who they thought Modernism was for […] I’ve never felt guilty about owning that subjectivity. On the other hand I feel that once you recognise it, you have to assume responsibility for it, and you have to also ask yourself, given that I occupy this position of privilege and power, how can I use that to advance the causes of others?”

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Charles Holland is an architect and former director of Fashion Architecture Taste. “However much narrative or literary ways into [architecture] that you have, the physicality of the thing you’re designing is increasingly to me what you need to engage in […] Ideas develop now in a different way than they did in the F.A.T. office, and probably that is because they develop with less discussion as a starting point. I’m much happier now to start with a thing and not know what it is, and to follow that process and be a little looser and more open about where it might lead”

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Steven J. Fowler is a poet and artist based in London. “Poetry is a way of mediating our own confusion about the role language plays in the relationship between ourselves and our thoughts, and ourselves and other human beings. It is essentially the problem of other minds, with language put at the forefront […] When I began writing poetry I tried to control language to create emotional insight, and that is what I think most poems try to do […] and it is my belief now that that’s not true. […] After trying for a couple of years to write smooth poems about wild animals or foxes or whatever poets do in the countryside I realised actually I can’t control anything, I’m going to die, and that language, before that death, will not comfort me […] The first note of understanding language before you re-displace it as an art form is to understand that it will always fail to communicate what you want to communicate.”

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IF_DO are a London-based architecture practice, led by Al Scott, Sarah Castle and Thomas Bryans.“There’s a general shift at the moment away from a more egotistical architecture and towards a more community based architecture, and I think that comes across in our name and a lot of new practice’s names as well […] We had to think of who we were writing [our manifesto] for - were we writing it for other architects to read, or were we writing it for our clients, for people we are building buildings for?”

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Andrew Waugh is a founding director of Waugh Thistleton Architects. “We have climate change […] this issue bigger than anything else that’s ever faced us, and the fact that the vast majority of architects are not discussing it, confronting it, engaging with it, to me seems insane. It seems to me that this could be the end of the idea of architects unless we engage with this issue.”

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