Maria Lisogorskaya on Building With What a Place Gives You | Assemble, Craft & the Aral Sea

Maria Lisogorskaya is a founding member of Assemble, the London art-and-architecture collective that became the first studio to win the Turner Prize. Assemble started in 2010 with the Cineroleum, a cinema built inside a derelict petrol station, and took the 2015 Turner Prize for Granby Four Streets in Liverpool — housing rebuilt alongside residents, plus the Granby Workshop that still makes tiles and homeware today. The studio works across product prototyping, buildings, and organisational strategy, and is known for making things with its own hands. Maria teaches a masters studio at Central Saint Martins and is a visiting professor at the Vienna University of Technology. Recorded at the Aral School in Karakalpakstan, this conversation starts from an obvious tension: Assemble is known for neglected city spaces, and here the site is enormous and wild. Maria talks about working with what a place actually gives you — bringing in soil specialists and a colleague retraining as a horticulturist, and letting go of the architect-as-master-planner. She and Maxim get into why "community" can quietly become a word that keeps people at arm's length, and how she'd rather name the real task: to build with willow you talk to the person who's built with willow, then the yurt-maker, then an engineer willing to try something new. She describes the dialogue between craftsmen and contemporary engineering on a park in rural Japan built from Sugi cedar, where much of the friction turns out to be cultural — paperwork, insurance, who carries the risk — and open-ended briefs that Assemble narrows down itself, like the rice-light-earth experiments with Bauhaus Earth in Berlin. We close with the question we ask every guest: do you start a project already hopeful, or do you find hope along the way? Her answer is practical. You have to be hopeful to get anything done — the alternative is to do another kind of thing, like write a book. As a student she got so critical of every decision that she froze and did nothing; building anything, she says, means choosing to act. Interview — @maxim.velli Recorded as part of the Aral School programme, Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan. Production — Maxset Ametov, Sarthak Chakraborty 0:00 Meeting Maria 1:22 Assemble: city vs nature 2:18 Learning what we don't know 2:44 Beyond the master planner 4:55 Getting the order right 5:32 Architecture as collective action 7:38 Willow, yurts and experiments 8:27 Craft meets engineering: Japan 9:57 Working without a brief 11:48 The blitz round 15:15 The hope question