Scaffold

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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Jonathan Tuckey founded his design practice in 2000 having previously worked for David Chipperfield Architects and Fletcher Priest Architects. He has long been one of the UK's leading advocates for remodelling and radically transforming old buildings for modern uses.

The podcast is supported this week by VELUX and features a short pre-reel interview with Thomas Vonier — architect and former president of the International Union of Architects. th UIA is assembling in Barcelona this month for the World Congress of Architects, which VELUX are also supporting.

Jonathan's episode begins around the 12 minute mark.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield.
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Morgan Day is a writer based in Tucson Arizona who works across professional architecture writing and literary fiction. Her debut novel,The Oldest Bitch Alive, is out this month from Akoya Publishing in the UK, and Astra House in the US.

“We tend to think of our bodies as having barriers, but we’re actually very porous. We’re in this constant state of becoming and effecting our environment, and our environment is constantly affecting and infecting us. I wanted to put these ideas on the page in a story, not only through living creatures, but through built structures too.” –MD
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Morgan Day is a writer based in Tucson Arizona who works across professional architecture writing and literary fiction. Her debut novel,The Oldest Bitch Alive, is out this month from Akoya Publishing in the UK, and Astra House in the US.

“We tend to think of our bodies as having barriers, but we’re actually very porous. We’re in this constant state of becoming and effecting our environment, and our environment is constantly affecting and infecting us. I wanted to put these ideas on the page in a story, not only through living creatures, but through built structures too.” –MD

Image credit: “Ungodly” by Ambera Wellman, 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.