Show Notes
Alison Crawshaw, whose practice encompasses architecture, landscape, urban design, and installations, is on the pod this week.
In our conversation we focus on two key projects of hers that bookend her practice to date, and that share a philosophy of working with existing conditions rather than imposing top-down transformations.
The first project, from 2012, called the politics of bricollage, which Alison developed during her time as a Rome scholar in architecture, examines the outskirts of that city to highlight small-scale, user-led interventions shape the built environment outside formal planning processes.
The second project, called open Havelock, which was just recently completed, transforms undercroft garages in London’s Havelock Estate into a series of community rooms instead of demolishing them, in a bid to repurpose overlooked urban spaces.
Both projects acknowledge the role of everyday users as co-creators of urban space, and push for a more adaptive, bottom-up approach to urbanism, suggesting grassroots tactics for future urban development.
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More from Scaffold
Re-running this 2019 interview with Mary Duggan to celebrate her recent Stirling Prize win. Congrats Mary! Back again next week with a new episode.
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John Tuomey comes on the pod to discuss Middle Quarter, the second volume of his memoir, recorded live at the Barbican on 27 July 2026 as part of the Architecture Foundation's Architecture on Stage series.
Níall McLaughlin is this year's recipient of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal—awarded for more than three decades of work ranging from a seaside bandstand at Bexhill to the Stirling Prize-winning library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. To mark the occasion, his practice has released a new book, published by Objectif Edition and co-edited with Bryony Jones. And it's far from your typical architecture monograph.Uncle Toby's Garden, and it takes its title from Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne's mid-eighteenth-century novel—a book that seems to have arrived from the future, treating the conventions of the still-young English novel as toys to be dismantled, and anticipating experimental fiction by roughly two centuries. It tries to capture real experience, and the movement of consciousness, in a way that tidy, linear narrative can't.
Michael Mack is the founder of London-based independent art and photography publishing house MACK. This conversation was recorded live at POST PRESS. More info and upcoming event tickets here.