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MB: When I started the podcast seven years ago, the decline in architectural criticism had already been notable for years — in the loss of dedicated critic positions, the shrinking cultural authority of criticism and the migration of discourse away from newspapers and toward fragmented digital platforms. Attention had shifted toward listicles, images, or promotional pieces masquerading as criticism. Architecture writing became something more akin to clickbait. That was part of my reason for starting the podcast. I wasn't finding the coverage of architecture I was hungry for, so I decided to go out and speak with architects myself. At the same time, I was listening to — and still listen to — a lot of podcasts, and I find the long-form interview is an ideal way to pay sustained attention to a subject. It's an opportunity to sink into someone's ideas and follow a line of reasoning through, with less distraction than visual or screen-based media.
I always enjoyed shows like Bookworm [1], hosted by Michael Silverblatt out of KCRW in Santa Monica, where every week he'd speak with a different novelist about a recently published book. Over the past 30 years he's spoken with some of the greatest literary figures in the world, and he has a way of cutting through the PR exercise of a public interview and getting to the heart of the writer's work and their motivations — sharing insights you wouldn't expect from a journalist. It's a much more intimate format.
Another I listened to fanatically was Longform [2], an hour-long interview each week with a different journalist about a recent piece they'd written. It offered a level of intimacy around someone's craft that you don't see on a screen.
MB: This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer, because the editorial intent has always been fairly subconscious. But it was likely informed by my background in English literature and my interest in architecture as an outsider to the discipline.
I read a lot of Geoff Manaugh's writing on BLDGBLOG [3], a blog from the aughts heavily inspired by writers like J.G. Ballard, ie: people who saw architecture always in connection with a wider set of influences. So architecture was always an expanded field to me, which has informed who I speak with. It's not just architects, but artists, designers, landscape architects, novelists, poets — people whose work might not be rooted in practice but is, at least in my view, connected to it.
MB: There's been a real atrophy of architectural criticism — but really it's more a decline of the public intellectual more broadly, tied to much larger shifts in media. Criticism is no longer a top-down process where experts at prestige publications impart their knowledge to a readership. Instead it's much more democratic and messy and specific, with more people expounding to much smaller audiences. That's part of why podcasts have proliferated in the past decade.
There are still good architecture critics, don’t get me wrong — I read Olly Wainwright [4] and Christopher Hawthorne [5] , and there are many others behind paywalls now whom I once read more often — Edwin Heathcote [6] and Rowan Moore [7], for example.
There are publications like PIN-UP [8], which balances rigour with a real sense of glamour and sex appeal, as far as architectural writing goes at least, and the New York Review of Architecture [9] which to me is one of the most exciting publishers of architectural criticism today. The most recent issue of NYRA features a face-off review of Foster’s 270 Park Avenue, between Paul Goldberger and Mark Krotov. There's a sense of drama to how the essays are formatted, running in parallel across the gutter of the paper, and the writing itself is sophisticated, entertaining and at times exhilarating.
I know I’ve veered away from the question of criticism and towards architecture writing more broadly, but it’s worth mentioning here for readers that the two pieces of recent writing I hold close to my heart are both works of long form journalism, and both from the New Yorker: Ian Parker’s 2024 piece on Kanye West’s Tadao Ando-designed Malibu house [12], which braids together the stories of West, Ando and the contractor living on site who was being paid by West to destroy the building. The other is Sam Knight’s 2023 piece on a young architect who struggles to reconcile his radical environmental vision with the realities of the mainstream architecture industry. [13] This isn’t formal architectural criticism, but in some ways far better!
MB: It's funny — Bookworm doesn't exist anymore. Michael had a stroke and isn't able to work. Longform ended two years ago. And in my own media diet, especially my podcast diet, it's more and more material that is functional and efficient — about digesting current events, or improving my health or productivity. The culture of optimisation really feels all-pervasive now.
There's less space for a kind of intellectual engagement that on the face of things isn't useful or productive, but on a much deeper, almost spiritual level is still fulfilling. That's a high-minded way of putting it, and I don't think I get close to achieving it — but it's something I always looked for. When I was a student in English literature and listening to shows like Bookworm, it was kind of like going to church and having revelations. I don't think we value that, or look for it, in the same way now — at least not in the discussions about architecture we have.
A lot of mainstream architectural criticism now leads with carbon footprints, housing affordability, labour conditions, displacement, accessibility, or the politics of who's commissioning what. These are urgent and legitimate frames, but they tend to displace an older register of criticism — the kind that focused on atmosphere, proportion, threshold, light, the phenomenology of moving through a space. There's arguably less attention paid to the experiential qualities of the built environment in architectural criticism today, because they don't always have this moral or utilitarian edge.
MB: There's the term TLDR — too long, didn't read, just give me the bullet points. And increasingly, popular architectural writing is probably formatted in that manner.
But the interesting, experimental writing I've been reading lately — most recently from an artist named Jaakko Pallasvuo [14] , who's based in Finland — is that the text isn't really a product. Becoming a product isn't the point. The writing he and a lot of his contemporaries do is interested in rendering the labyrinth of thinking, and having the reader follow that labyrinth and take pleasure in the process of thought unfolding. It's very resistant to summary or artificial synopsis — if you tried to apply that to writing like Pallasvuo’s, it becomes totally insufficient, so much weaker than the original.
A long-form interview can work the same way: it meanders, you're not sure where it might go, and at its best it's totally dependent on two minds being open to some kind of mutual discovery. That frankly doesn't happen often, but it's the aspiration — that there's an element of chance and even magic when you get two brains together unpacking ideas, exposing themselves in ways that might not happen on a page or in front of an audience, revealing underlying forces or preoccupations that would be hard to uncover otherwise.
MB: I think it's even harder to bypass the sales pitch with architects than with other cultural workers, because architecture is so bound up in capital and risk and reputation that all good architects are, by definition, excellent salesmen.
And there's another layer to it: architects are notorious for speaking in a very inaccessible way about buildings — precisely, I think, because their medium is space and material and light, things that are effectively ineffable. So we always do a pretty bad job of talking about architecture.
Part of the challenge of having a genuine conversation with an architect is creating the conditions where they can speak more freely. There's a kind of conversation that architects (and artists, writers, etc) rarely get to have, which is one where the interviewer isn't extracting a quote or a story that flatters (or flattens) the project. It’s this extractive frame that produces guardedness. What dissolves it is usually some demonstration that you're genuinely curious about the same questions they are.
MB: I just had this image of the magician on stage performing some miraculous feat — which is maybe a useful metaphor for the architect, who can make building look so easy and fun at the same time, when in fact there's often so much agony that goes hand in hand with the design of a building, or any creative act. For publicity's sake, all of that is masked or concealed.
One of the aims of the podcast is to pull back that curtain — to take the struggle and the complexity as the subject matter, not the perfect final image.
MB: Architecture makes us acutely aware of how form and content, or style and substance, are inextricably bound. Language is part of that. You can't entirely separate the rhetoric of a text from its fundamental meaning. You have to accept that it's as much about how we frame things, how we decide to look at them, versus how they really are. I've always enjoyed that puzzle — trying to get as close to what I feel is the “real thing.”
And there's this thing I often mention when asked to explain the podcast: the name Scaffold is really about language and how it both supports and obscures the object of interpretation. Buildings are so dependent on rhetoric to be made sense of, and the way you describe something changes the way you see and understand it. But at the same time there's an innate property to a building that you maybe start to lose touch with as you focus more on the language around it. The words can get in the way. Somehow I am drawn to that contradiction.
MB: I always record a lot more than I publish, even if the final episode might still seem sprawling and rambling. I see the interview as a process of almost panning for gold — I accept there will be a lot of unusable material, probably down to my own lack of skill in conducting the original conversation, and I'll edit quite rigorously to keep the most valuable parts.
MB: I'm extremely self-conscious as a writer, and I'll often erase and rewrite to such an extent that it's hard to make any progress at all. With a conversation, you can't go back. You're on the train, moving forward, and self-censorship or self-criticism is replaced by a sense of urgency — to express, in the moment, to the best of your ability, what you're trying to say.
I like the pressure of the conversation, that you have an audience, that the words simply must arrive one after the other — sometimes even before you really know what you're going to say. There's something exciting and beautiful and mysterious about the process of speaking. For a time, I would actually sit in on Quaker meetings for that reason, and it's a similar kind of dynamic: you sit in a circle, and at some point someone just begins to speak. It comes from somewhere else — somewhere less conscious, and more revealing. Ideally, every interview becomes like a Quaker meeting of two.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2026.
Website by Good as Gold.