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.

“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.” - MD
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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.

Tuomey co-founded O'Donnell + Tuomey with Sheila O'Donnell in 1988. Together they have built the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar, the Glucksman in Cork, the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, the Saw Swee Hock Student Centre at the LSE, and the V&A East in Stratford, and were jointly awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2015.

The conversation traces a childhood spent moving every two years between his father's construction sites, an education at UCD in the wake of the Flying Circus, and a first job in James Stirling's office secured by a phone call at six on a Friday evening. Tuomey talks about returning to Dublin in the 1980s to work on a derelict city, the founding of Group 91 and the competition for Temple Bar, the shift from cellular to volumetric thinking at Letterfrack, and the pinball machine that gave the Irish language centre in Derry its plan. He is also candid about the years after the LSE when work dried up entirely, and about being retired from UCD on his birthday after four decades of teaching.

Middle Quarter is published by Lilliput Press. First Quarter, the first volume, is also available.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production.

Special thanks to VELUX for supporting this episode: https://velux.com/design
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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.

Níall's book is similarly non-linear, organised around digressions rather than buildings. Its title character, Uncle Toby, is a wounded veteran who spends his days re-enacting old battles on his bowling green, in a pastime both trivial and profound. In that spirit, the book reframes architecture as a performance of ritual, collaboration, speculation and play.

Fittingly, our conversation took place at 10 Bowling Green Lane, home of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and the temporary site of the Architecture Foundation's summer programme, POST PRESS. It was recorded on Tuesday 21 July 2026.

Link to Níall's lecture Circling a Star - a Daylight Talk: https://www.niallmclaughlin.com/media/circling-a-star-a-daylight-talk/
Thanks to Velux for supporting the podcast. Velux.com/design

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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.

Thanks to VELUX for supporting the podcast: velux.com/design

Link to the AF POST PRESS programme

Books discussed:

W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, 2003)
Le Corbusier, Aircraft (The Studio, 1935)
Reconstructing Space: Architecture in Recent German Photography, ed. Michael Mack (AA Publications, 1999)
Contemporary Architecture series, ed. Leonardo Benevolo (Cappelli, 1964–)
Manfredo Tafuri, Modern Architecture in Japan, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi (MACK, 2022)
Andrea Bagnato, Terra Infecta: Disease and the Italian Landscape (MACK Sightlines, 2026)
Kwan Queenie Li, Weeds: A Germinating Theory (MACK Sightlines, 2026)
Caruso St John, Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005 (MACK, 2022)
Takashi Homma, Tokyo Olympia (Nieves, 2023)
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible (MACK / Archive of Modern Conflict, 2013)
Collier Schorr, Jens F. (SteidlMACK, 2005)
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943; Winston translation, 1969)
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