Tony Fretton founded his eponymous architecture practice in 1982. His early work in London, including the Lisson Gallery (1986-1992), was influential in defining a new approach to architecture focused on urban context and daily life.

“By the time I graduated, London was completely different. It wasn’t opulent, it was poor, and punk was an attitude that accepted the nihilism of the state and of the city. All those songs by the Sex Pistols, they rang true, they weren’t just inventions. Punk was really important to me - punks were ethical, they had an idea of the world and it was about make and mend, about living in the margins, and that was the background from which I developed my practice.” – TF

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Luke Jones and George Gingell are hosts of the podcast About Buildings and Cities.

"We’re interested in getting into things that are obscure [in architectural history], but we’re also interested in looking at things that are super obvious. […] Taking Gaudi for example, he’s the world’s favourite architect, and he’s also curiously elusive and totally unfashionable - like kitch embarrassing tea-towel stuff. At the same time, he is such a strange and virtuosic designer. We’re interested in trying to make sense of that thing that seems so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to talk about."

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Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology at Kings College London, and the son of the celebrated painter Frank Bowling, whose studio he now manages.

"Frank always wanted children, but did not want to be a father, because of his own father’s violence; by being an absent father through my infancy and childhood, Frank allowed me to re-write the script of fatherhood.

"One thing that is joyous about working in the studio is being able to involve my son, who’s now in his 30’s, and his son, who’s two and a half. The fact that we now have four generations of male Bowlings in the studio, coming together around the work, is a source of joy. It’s almost like we disrupted this old pattern of what fatherhood should be."

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Asli Çiçek is an Architect and writer based in Brussels, whose work focuses on scenography and exhibition design.

"Culture is not a luxury. I don’t like populistic discussions about what culture should be or how history should be flattened to a quick communication. I think it’s fantastic to not understand everything at once, to keep the fascination for history and culture alive in museums […] 

"There is no shame in having culture. If there’s a debate I silently follow, it’s that there is a necessity for culture in society – not only as an egalitarian concept, but as an educational concept. That is something I try to stand for."

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

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Charlotte Cooper is the author of Poundbury: a Queer Tour of Monarchy, published earlier this year by 33 Editions.

"One of my bugbears about Poundbury is that it’s not an honest place – it’s pretending to be something that it isn’t. They talk about how green it is, how it is invested in traditional building techniques, but it’s also breeze blocks, it’s plastic, it’s a great place to park your car […] My question is, if you could, what would bring the truth our of Poundbury, what would show it for what it is?"

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Robin Winogrond is a Landscape Architect based in Zurich.

"I try to never look at what I expect to see, but to see in a raw way, in an uninformed way, I try to read space and atmospheres in the most unschooled way I can, to soak up as much knowledge as I can." – RW

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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Karin Templin is an architect, educator, and author of the book At Home in London: The Mansion Block, co-published by The Architecture Foundation and MACK.

This book is first in a series on types of London housing, reflecting on the place of the home in the city in the light of its longstanding housing crisis. To find out more visit mackbooks.co.uk

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This episode originally aired in April 2022.

Lesley Lokko is founder of the African Futures Institute and curator of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.

“I don’t see myself as being ‘the future’, but the expanded field [of architecture] that I’ve operated in for most of my life has given me something that is of use to he generation coming behind me, so that no matter how I end up making my living, I see myself first and foremost as a teacher.”

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. For more information visit https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/

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Sumayya Vally is a Musilm South African architect, and founder of the practice Counterspace.

“Architecture is abstract, and I think what I’m doing in my practice is making a concerted effort to find different sources for the origins of that abstraction. 

I think what has happened in the cannon and in the profession more broadly is that we’ve inherited so much that we don’t deeply question…I think the languages that we’ve inherited could do with being supplemented or oven being overtaken, dare I say, by other origins, that come from different ways of being and different value systems.”

– SV

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

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David Gissen is a New York-based author, designer, and educator who works in the fields of architecture, landscape, and urban design. 

His book, The Architecture of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) has been praised as “an exhilarating manifesto” and a “complete reshaping about how we view the development and creation of architecture.” The Architecture of Disability offers a critical perspective on histories and futures of buildings, cities, and landscapes — beyond a sole focus on the problems of accessibility.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield

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