Show Notes
Patrick McGraw is the editor and publisher of Heavy Traffic magazine. Based in NYC, designed by Richard Turley and featuring contributions as varied as Sheila Heti, Keller Easterling and Dean Kissick, Heavy Traffic understands and reflects the mood of contemporary life in a way that fiction is increasingly well suited to.
Literature has the ability to capture our now terminally online consciousness. Architecture, on the other hand—a cultural form that once stood for whole epochs—has in recent decades become anachronistic, divorced from the virtual world that increasingly holds us captive.
Patrick’s trajectory is interesting because he originally studied architecture before making a shift into journalism and eventually leading a literary magazine. In our conversation we try to bridge this gap between the world of architecture and fiction. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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.