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Nestled behind the Crocknamurrin Mountain Bog, beyond the sublime of the Glengesh Pass, lies the town of Ardara (Ard an Rátha), a rural village in southwest Donegal with a population of about 750 people. The context of southwest Donegal, like much of the West of Ireland, is characterised by a harsh environment shaped by the Atlantic coastline and its famed remoteness - factors that have long contributed to the allure and longevity of its most renowned export industry: Donegal Tweed.
In the spirit of the series, this article looks not towards whether a place is working hard or hardly working, but instead towards what we might glean from turning our attention to spaces of work themselves; what they might tell us about the story of a place, of how an emergent rural town found itself at the heart of a thriving cottage industry, and how that legacy continues to shape the fabric of this place today.
Anecdotal accounts refer to the sounds of working looms echoing through Ardara’s streets, where a trained ear could identify who exactly was weaving by the distinctive and unique clatter of their shuttle. A trade sustained by cottage industry into the 1970’s, looms were typically kept in working weaving sheds independent from the house – an early iteration of working from home before the concept of WFH as we have since come to know it. Separate from or to the rear of someone’s home, space for weaving has long been understood as a working shed more so than a studio space, or a place for artistic expression.
An informal environment, the weaving shed is carefully shaped by and for its user, with maximum practicality and ease of production in mind. What presents at first a disorderly chaos of timber sections, scrap yarns and curious tools reveals, on further interrogation, a perfectly planned and functional ecosystem. Level access is optimal for transferring heavy beams and yarns; garage doors to a laneway accommodate the proportions of double-width warp beams, and their loading in and out of trailers; 2.4m clear height allows vertical movement of the jacks, while 3.5m in width is required for swinging of the sley; a single LED light fixture plugged loosely into an extension cable illuminates the cloth beam for intricate on-loom mending, and so on. Beneath the tangible disarray of objects worn and used is something intangible – behaviours, habits and knowledge passed down through generations, linking this intimate, private space and its geographical location on earth inherently and forever to the identity of a craft. Workshop spaces like these belie the story and success of a place in ways both material and immaterial.
Geographically, the challenging conditions of mountainous bog terrain engendered a sense of isolation that contributed to the preservation of these traditional craft techniques. This terrain also provided the natural materials and resources required to produce and dye handwoven woollen textiles in times when communities were largely self-reliant, and living off the land.
In an economic context, Ardara’s textile industry has experienced periodic success punctuated by significant challenges. The Wool Act of 1699 implemented by the British Parliament prohibited, during a time of great success in the European market, the export of Irish woollen goods beyond the UK, to protect the English wool trade from competition with growing, colonial markets.
Ardara’s textile industry was supported by initiatives implemented by the Congested Districts Board, established by Arthur James Balfour at the end of the 19th Century with the intention of “killing Home Rule with kindness”. It is said that a visit paid by him to Donegal, prior to his establishment of the Board, “first opened his eyes to the poverty and misery prevailing there and brought about a change of heart” [1]
The Congested Districts Board's initiatives were designed to support local production and provide employment to areas that historically had relied on agriculture and home-based crafts. For Ardara, this took the form of the introduction of stamping high-quality handwoven goods, and led to the construction of a Mart building in 1912, where weavers would traverse from all over the rural area with their homespun frieze for inspection, storage and sale to the global market. [2]
The Congested Districts Board was purportedly involved in the provision of an improved hand-loom for weaving, invented by Mr. W.J.D. Walker, the Board’s organiser and inspector for industries, who generously placed his invention at the disposal of the Board. These improved looms were then supplied to the local weavers on a loan installment system.
Although it was arguably established to consolidate British influence in the region, it cannot be denied that the Congested Districts Board aided in supporting this cottage industry at a time where it was in decline and uniquely, in establishing a network between towns in southwest Donegal; linked by the spinning factory in Kilcar, to a carpet factory in Killybegs, to Magee’s in Donegal Town, to the handweavers and Mart of Ardara and its surrounds. Whether intentionally or not, this network has enabled not only the craft to endure in harsh climates - meteorological and economical - but also, the make-up of these places, how they interact with one another, and what is literally woven into their urban and rural fabric.
Often when looking at public space or the development of towns and their successes, with an architectural lens we look to the physical - how trade, culture, or industry have physically shaped a place. In this instance, to begin to understand this place, it is necessary to observe how these same cultural influences have shaped a town in an immaterial, intangible, maybe even invisible way. The weaving shed as it has always existed, is a fragment of industry previous; a byproduct of its environment, natural resources and the resourcefulness of the people who inhabited it and sustained a craft.
In Teague’s pub you’ll find pillow cases handwoven by John Heena leaning against the snug at the front, and a beautiful shuttle placed above the door that once belonged to the owner’s grandfather. Ask anyone in the town and they will likely know something or have some connection to weaving, be it an old loom in their shed, or some lingering knowledge of how to construct parts of a loom. This almost inherent shared knowledge and understanding provides a mystical reminder of the vibrancy and prevalence of a once commonplace skill.
Across Ireland we have seen a surge in the value of craft, of people returning to making things from scratch, growing foods from the earth, using their hands to create, all in response - and sometimes protest - to the mass production, consumption and colossal waste that is draining our planet’s resources. Following the introduction of power looms in the 1970’s, the industry changed, making Donegal Tweed a legitimate and successful export worldwide which continues to thrive today. On a smaller scale, we find ourselves in a different cycle of weaving, where the focus lies on the craft of weaving as an artisanal trade, rather than a scalable business model.
What was introduced earlier in this article as a humble, pragmatic workspace presents itself now as evidence of living heritage, a fragment of an industry past and an emblem of the future of handweaving in Ireland. It prompts a wider reflection on the revitalisation of Irish towns at large, examining their interconnectedness and the intangible forces that bind and sustain them. A holistic, ground-up approach is critical to any and all revitalisation efforts, rooted in the understanding of a place and responsive to the needs of its future; remaining ever mindful to see the story behind the shed.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2026.
[1] Donegal County Council Heritage Office, ‘Ardara Heritage Town’, 2008, available at: https://www.donegalculture.ie/media/l2pfjh0e/ardaraheritagetownbrochure.pdf [accessed 30th January 2026]
[2] Seán M. Ó Conchubhair, ‘The Congested Districts Board’, The Irish Monthly: Irish Jesuit Province, Vol. 69, No. 820 (Oct., 1941), pp. 477-488
What might happen if we began to see buildings as living creatures? Would it change how we design, build and treat them? Would we choose different materials at the design stage, and put more care into their construction or restoration? Would we be more willing to maintain them, and less likely to abandon them or accept their neglect?
Once I began to learn about roof thatching in Ireland, or vernacular buildings as a whole, I started to see them as living beings, and it was difficult to unsee. Old abandoned houses were now even more heartbreaking, like seeing an animal on its deathbed. A house with its lime plaster fallen away, exposing its mud innards, now seemed violent.
Despite the effort of the remaining thatchers in Ireland and the commitment of thatched homeowners to their maintenance, working with a critically endangered craft feels like trying to wake a sleeping giant. Imagine the effort it would take to get yourself to your feet after you’ve been laid to rest or been fully buried by most people as the world “moves on”. When I see the state of some thatched cottages in Ireland, I’m often left wondering should we just let it die, regularly exclaiming “slate the goddamn thing”. But it’s so ancient it's familiar to us all, it awakens the senses through the sounds, sights and smells.
These “living creatures” shared a symbiotic relationship with their inhabitants; people built and maintained them, relying on a continued connection to their surroundings to source the materials for lime washing, thatching, and keeping the fire going, while the home sheltered the people, allowing them to gather around a fire to stay warm, cook and tell stories – to share the workload with their neighbours when the house needed thatching.
“The use of local building materials meant that they fitted into landscapes of which they were literally a part, their clay or stone walls gathered from the earth on the spot, their timbers dug from the bogs, their thatch harvested from the fields.” - E. Estyn Evans, 1957 [1]
Old thatched houses have a presence to them, it can feel like encountering a giant beast, and thatching them can feel like giving it a new shaggy coat for winter. Dressing up weather wounds when its base coat has become exposed can feel like a surgical procedure. Examining the condition of the roof structure in the attic feels like glimpsing into a dusty ribcage made of bog wood and branches, sometimes coated with fibrous scraw (the top layer of the bog), or thatch tied directly to its skeletal structure with handmade sugán rope. Smoke blackened by the well-tended hearth beneath, like the lungs of a lifelong smoker. Hearing ghost stories about the house; as we expose the historic layers of straw we disrupt ancient dust, wondering if we are at risk of being haunted by its spirits.
There are many reasons for the drawn-out death of thatching, the obvious being the lack of thatchers. The ancient craft has been struggling to survive for the last 70 years or so, despite it being a distinguishing feature of Irish vernacular architecture. As a result, we often encounter them in a state of emergency, with not enough time or support to save them. It’s a beautiful thing to work with a compostable material, but not when it’s composting on top of someone's historic home.
Ceann tuí (head of straw) is the Irish term for thatched house, indicating how common straw was as a thatching material. But the term became less and less appropriate over the last century for various reasons. When combine harvesters convenienced our world, it rendered straw unsuitable for thatching. Also, the adoption of more wind-resilient varieties led to shorter straw, too short for thatching. This contributed to the significant decline in the number of iconic thatched houses across the country. Northern Ireland, for example, had 40,000 thatched buildings in the 1950s, but today has only 180. [2]
People's perspectives on thatched buildings can sometimes feel reminiscent of the way the Irish language was viewed for so long: something that should be left in the past, that we didn’t need, associated with poverty, peasantry and tough times. It feels as though something is shifting with the Irish language in that regard. Could the same be happening for our endangered heritage crafts? With the urgency to adapt a carbon-heavy, wasteful industry that relies heavily on imported and non-biodegradable materials, and to create more climate-resilient homes - under which we will need to escape rising temperatures - could thatched roofs make a comeback? Or could they be seen as even more of a fire risk, when wildfires become the norm for us in Ireland, any more than a timber-frame house insulated with Kingspan?
There’s talk of the tourism industry in Ireland adapting to the changing climate with the installation of air conditioning in accommodation. It seems unfortunate and disjointed that this is the solution to climate resilience for an industry that gives visitors a glimpse into Irish culture.
The stark reality is that today in Ireland even roof thatching is significantly reliant on imported materials to keep the craft alive. The recent fuel strikes this year, however, reminded us all how precarious the global supply chains are, for food and many other imported goods. Thatching material is now imported from as far away as China, and we would have little backup if the supply ceased entirely.
Though there is a supply of Irish thatching materials, it is very limited, and nothing should be in endless supply if we are to live within planetary boundaries. Water reed is still harvested by hand around the Shannon Estuary among other places, an ancient trade in itself, and there are a few farmers still passionate enough to grow heritage grains for thatching straw. But the challenges around growing straw or harvesting reed put most off. The health of our soil and rivers deeply affects the quality of the materials too, which shortens their life on the roof.
Ultimately, growing a building material has multiple ecological and environmental benefits: water reed, for example, is a regenerative plant that absorbs carbon, helps clean water, provides habitats for birds and insects, and the fresh growth of a managed bed is more climate resilient than an unmanaged reed bed, as it holds more water. Its byproduct is a building material that keeps a home's internal atmosphere regulated at different times of year. It also provides a habitat on your roof for insects, sometimes even bees or birds. Though that could be still seen as a negative to some.
Today there is an expectation for a roof to last a minimum of 20 years. And despite there being grants available for homeowners, the price to thatch a roof today would mean you’d want it to last at least that. We have collectively forgotten these skills, perhaps by design, where something that was once common knowledge is now a specialised skill.
The modern world's expectation to have longevity, consistency and convenience has infiltrated a craft that would have used straw from the field next door and shared the work with the neighbours, and if it lasted a few years, that’d do…
Fear of maintenance influences our approach to modern design and construction, and seems to be steeped in an embedded colonial fear of nature, and the need to suppress it. That buildings must remain static and more machine-like. The maintenance of vernacular buildings, however, required a continued connection and familiarity with the place from which it was built and its local materials.
They are more than just our built heritage; more than a picturesque cottage on a Fáilte Ireland postcard. It may seem like a small issue amongst the many issues we are facing, however, these are often peoples homes, protected structures, and our last remaining heritage buildings and examples of Irish vernacular architecture.
It seems their fitting into the landscape so successfully has caused them to be overlooked or undervalued as examples of sustainable architecture. That these simple structures can just dissolve to the earth gives me a feeling of hope. Containing clues to the past, they act as libraries of ancient attunement and understanding in how to truly build sustainably and in harmony with nature. Perhaps this is not an end to, or death of, something – but the last phase of a cycle. If we were to cast ourselves forward, what might the new cycle look like? And might it weave us back into the delicate tapestry of land, nature, and human connection?
Reflecting on her time spent thatching Irish homes, Alice Bowler considers what an endangered craft might teach us about care, materials and building in step with the land.
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My first job in architecture was with a small practice in the Wicklow village of Ballyknockan. I spent three summers designing one-off houses across the county's hillsides and valleys. Working within the stringent requirements of Wicklow County Council, in a landscape designated as an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ [1], demanded careful negotiation between planning policy, client ambition and the landscape itself. Occasionally that process produced inventive architectural solutions. More often, however, it resulted in another familiar bungalow, little different from the one that had secured permission for the previous generation.
Towards the end of my time at this firm, I noticed an increased client workload. There was an ever-growing appetite to pursue constructing a new dwelling on family lands, in some instances by people who, like me, were in their early twenties. Initially, I was surprised that so many people were seeking to build on family land in rural Wicklow. I had spent my entire adolescence listening to siblings and peers alike voice their eagerness to move to towns, cities or abroad, anywhere with a more vibrant social scene than our village of eight hundred people. Looking past the naivety of youth, the true reason for this change was obvious. Spiralling urban house prices, remote working and changing attitudes to where people could live had transformed the economics of rural life.
It is a combination of the above factors that instigated the resurgence of the rural one-off house we are currently witnessing. This residential typology has been under scrutiny for some time, and perhaps rightly so. [2] They undermine the towns and villages they surround, promote car dependence and make their mark on the natural landscape. [3]
During the Celtic Tiger era, there was an effort to manage the spread of this typology with the government introducing the Sustainable Rural Housing Guidelines for Planning Authorities (2005) [4]. Local Authorities attempted to limit their construction to those with a strong tie to said rural areas and only when they could demonstrate an economic or social requirement to build them. The criteria to qualify had become laborious requiring various verifications to demonstrate qualification such as proof of, at a minimum, ten years living in the area, or alternatively, strong connection to the agricultural industry.
The restrictive nature outlined above inevitably led to an increase in planning refusals, prompting calls for an ease of planning restrictions from local communities. As the government looks to meet its housing targets, it seeks to diversify how it can reach them. One avenue they have examined is the rural one-off house, which is having its policy reviewed for the first time in twenty years. A new national planning statement is being prepared. Included within is an upgrade to the rural guidelines, aimed to improve transparency and certainty for people applying to build their own home, enabling more consistent decisions between various local authorities and supporting balanced rural development aligned with national policy. [5]
The outcome and success of this proposed legislation is yet to be seen. Despite the bureaucratic blockades on getting approval for rural housing, the stock that is currently produced tends to be subpar from a design perspective. If we are about to witness a new era of rural development, can we encourage thoughtful design and prevent a rerun of bungalow bliss of the 1970s or the explosion of McMansions we witnessed during the Celtic Tiger years? Local Authorities across the country currently provide design guidelines [6], but what we tend to see is house after house sitting on a one-acre site with the usual unfinished hardcore drive, concrete kerbing and a severe lack of biodiversity in landscape design.
If we are to see an increase in rural housing stock, how do we improve design quality while mitigating its environmental impact? Perhaps the answer lies not in inventing new suburban hybrids, but in looking back at how rural settlements naturally formed.
The traditional Irish Hamlet, or Clachán, was an organic cluster of dwellings that minimised landscape disruption, consolidated services like wells and drainage, and naturally concentrated movement into localised nodes. [7] By planning for multi-generational living from the outset, this model could provide a dignified, cohesive framework for families to adapt over time, replacing the current ad-hoc reality of ribbon development with high quality, landscape led architecture.
In my experience surveying farmyards that were being prepared to make way for new dwellings; what struck me was how carefully they had been sited. Buildings leaned into hedgerows for shelter from prevailing winds, stepped with the contours rather than against them, and formed sheltered yards at their centre. There is something worth recovering here, not simply the appearance of traditional farmyards, but the logic that shaped them. [8]
Where suburban estates attempt an awkward compromise between the urban and the rural, importing standardised road geometry, concrete block boundaries, tarmac turnarounds and uniform setbacks into open country; the clustered farmyard layout, by contrast, is wholly rural. It draws on the spatial principles of landscape led design where varying building volumes step with topography, lean into existing hedgerows and share a central courtyard.
The modern take on the farmyard layout is well positioned as a potential multi-dwelling solution for rural contexts. This format allows families to collate and pool financial resources to create a home, and provides the potential for multi-generational living. The layout allows for different typologies to exist in a cluster. Families can rotate through units as they progress through their life. The family live in a main house; their children grow up and use the smaller adjacent buildings to establish their own independent households away from the main homestay. As the parents age and look to downsize the family rotates, parents use the smaller dwellings, thus the cycle continues. This avoids the building of suburban style bungalows in a back land fashion; it keeps development compact and rural in character.
This format is not just suited to the nuclear family, but also provides potential for households in various formats, the variation in dwelling provides options for diversity, single households who wish to remain in a rural setting but find it difficult to find stock that is suited in size. This provides variety.
A study undertaken by Teagasc and the Heritage Council [8] documented the various typologies of farmyard layouts, which offer options and formats depending on the user’s needs:
1. Scattered Farmyard:
Traditionally found within the mountainous districts, particularly in the west of Ireland, where level ground is in short supply.
2. Small courtyard:
Buildings on three sides; the fourth side is a boundary wall. The dwelling faces the road. This layout is particularly common in Ulster, Western Connacht or south-west Munster.
3. Half Courtyard:
Buildings form two ranges at right angles to each other.
4. Full Courtyard:
A range of buildings close off all four sides of a rectangular yard.
5. Extended Farmyard:
Found mainly in the northern half of Ireland, a single row of buildings.
6. Detached Courtyard:
Mainly associated with the landlord estates of Ireland but can also be found on some of the larger traditional farms.
These layouts provide both a historic precedent and a viable spatial framework, the scattered farmyard, for instance, offered tailored response to sites with challenging topography. Most importantly, all these formats generate an informal, shared public realm, delivering an open space at a proportion and scale that avoids the sprawling, ecologically sterile lawns of modern single dwelling builds.
In effect, this approach delivers on the original, unfulfilled promise of suburbia, a synthesis of rural landscape and neighbouring community, but without the suburban sprawl. It opens a form of “micro-suburbia” accessible to those who wish to live rurally but lack the vast resources or family land required for a standalone “McMansion”.
Critically the barrier to this model is not that it is strictly prohibited by planning law, but that it lacks any administrative template or active promotion. Current local authority guidance remains fixated on regulating the individual detached house, offering no path or precedent for clustered development. Reimagining rural housing requires overcoming not just policy inertia, but a deep-seated cultural obsession with the isolated gated homestead. By shifting our perspective, we can demonstrate that shared courtyards and close neighbours do not compromise rural privacy, they build genuine, resilient communities.
Some readers may highlight what I am describing is a village and that rural villages are in decline and arguably the way to cure this is to bring people back into them. However, as is the case with Carnew and Dunlavin in South Wicklow, there are caps on the housing stock that can be developed in many of these areas - limiting population growth from the outset. How can we expect these communities to grow and thrive when their development is being hampered? [1] As well as this, both had new schools proposed and granted full planning permission back in 2023 but as of 2026 both projects are stalled in Stage 2b. (9) This demonstrates the systematic challenges of reinvigorating our rural towns and villages, it will take time for them to accommodate their growing populations.
The debate surrounding one-off housing has too often been framed as a choice between preservation and development. It need not be, If we are to reimagine and move forward with contemporary notions of rural housing, a more considered and holistic approach is required than the all or nothing rhetoric that often dominates the discourse. If Ireland is entering a new chapter of rural planning, then architecture has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to shape it differently. The success of the next generation of one-off houses should not be measured by the number of permissions granted, but by whether they strengthen communities, respect the landscape and create places worth inheriting.
In this article, Joseph Kavanagh explores the resurgence of the rural one-off house, its polarising legacy, and whether the typology could be reimagined as a vehicle for collective living to support rural communities.
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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.
An interview with Matthew Blunderfield, host of Scaffold podcast, that touches on architectural media, podcasting, and the value of long-form content in a distracted world.
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