Vaissnavi Shukl
The first time I heard the word “folly” was in relation to Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris – the large park with dozens of red structures strategically organised in a grid – each embodying the principles of deconstruction. I had been fascinated with the relevance and functionality of follies and even more amused by the lack of its typology. So when I came across  young British historian’s docuseries called  ‘Follies’, I knew I had to speak to him to appease my 21 year old self. He not only told us about the history of some of the oldest follies, but also made interesting connections from follies, fun and food.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Okay then go ahead and qualify a folly for us. What do you mean when you say a folly?

Rory Fraser
Okay. So, I should start by saying that the joy of follies is that they are slightly unquantifiable. So it’s quite hard to answer that question with any precision, but by a way of working definition, broadly speaking, a Folly is a structure or a building that is very elaborate, well definitely overly elaborate for its function, which is often fairly limited. And it often serves to improve a view in some way shape or form. And that’s about it. That is a very, very broad working definition of a folly.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Have you seen House of Cards?

Rory Fraser
Which one? There’s no British one. There’s a new American one,

Vaissnavi Shukl
No, no. The American one.

Rory Fraser
I might have done.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Okay. So in that the main person, the character, contests their election from a place in, I believe it’s South Carolina, a place called Gaffney. And it’s very iconic because that place actually in real life has a water tower in the shape of a peach. It’s called peach-oid. But it’s essentially a water tower. You can…you can look it up. The funny thing about that and I’ll come to the form and function question is, it’s a water tower but it’s shaped as a peach. You think that qualifies as a folly or for it to be a folly it does not have a function. Doesn’t it need to have a function but yet this one does?

Rory Fraser
Yeah, that’s a very good question and I think it’s important to… follies are fluid things, they are not binary. It is not like it is a folly or isn’t folly. Follies are on sort of a sliding scale from the sort of the pure folly which is completely insane, something which might have foliage characteristics, something which clearly isn’t a folly at all. So in that instance, I’d say that that structure is definitely tending towards a folly. It didn’t need to be built as a peach, it was unnecessary. So yes, I think that I mean, I wouldn’t say that it’s a pure for me, but that you know, then again, the Victorians built water towers in the 19th century, as follies buildings in the landscapes which which improve view fugu for picnics and whatever were built in a very elaborate way. But they also happen to function as water towers. But again, it’s a discretion of the way it’s designed. It’s… it’s a ratio or a balance between ostentation and use. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
We’ll have a separate question… separate discussion on whether Bernard Tschumi will agree with any of the conversation that we’re having, because we’re all as architects obsessed with the Parc de la Villette and in Paris, that’s designed by Bernard Tschumi and it’s a large park with these red colour structures dispersed throughout and he calls them the follies of for any architecture famous in the word folly. They’ll be like, oh, Bernard Tschumi, but he has an interesting take on the form and function when it comes to Follies. And at the beginning of …

Rory Fraser
I’d be very interested to hear that but I’d love to hear that but I think you know, so here’s a very simple example, in a garden. If you had a sundial, a simple sundial on a plinth. That’s not a folly. That’s a sundial. But if that sundial has a large gazebo because you’ve over the top and this is set within its own little garden and some of them are enormous and maybe there’s a pink hippo, sort of a statue of a pink hippo nearby, on top of the gazebo. Then that sundial is beginning to morph into a folly. So as I said, it’s a sliding relationship. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So there’s a level of like extraordinary-ness to these follies. It’s something out of the ordinary 

Rory Fraser
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s out of the ordinary because in the 18th century in England, they were very normal. Follies were considered an essential part of your garden, sort of high end b&q, go to… the bench, I suppose that we might have today or something. So they’re not out of the ordinary, but then it comes back to this question of function. Are they built in a very in… unnecessarily loud way in whatever their function may or may not be? The example, I think that you initially were interested in the Temple for Windsor Castle Howard. It’s a temple which… It only used to read in and maybe have picnics in and that building would have cost the owner a huge amount of money to build by one of the top architects in the country with a huge amount of glass and stone and slate, and God knows what else. You know it’s completely unnecessary. So that definitely qualifies as a folly, even though it has some sort of function. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So the beginning of each episode in the series that you just shot, every show you start with, like a wonderful prologue of you know, what the follies are and how the place that they occupy in the English landscape. And you ask us the viewers to this is quote, imagine a world where form is more important than function, or even where form is the function and then when I look at the four follies, that you’re talking about in the series, I’m intrigued , by how the same form serves multiple functions, and it’s interesting and absurd at the same time. Like two of the towers that you talk about in the series, were built with an entirely different purpose, but then they kind of adapt to the changing cultural political landscape. And then during the two wars, they become part of the Defence infrastructure. Are you sure… Do you still think the form can ever be function?

Rory Fraser
I do. Yes. I mean, I think it comes back to this point that I mentioned earlier about, it’s a sliding scale. So I’d say that some follies in the documentary are more a case of form is more important than function. On that side is greater than others. I’d say attend more to the point where form is the function so some are more obsessed with form than others. So the first example, Rushton Triangular Lodge and the last one, Faringdon Tower, really don’t have any discernible functions at all. It’s entirely about the form. It’s entirely about… the decorative detail which is put on… the on the sort of… on the triangular building. And it’s entirely about this mad statement byLord Berners, putting a huge tower in the middle of a… of a… I mean, I know it has a viewing platform, but that really wasn’t the reason that was built. It was built as a statement. So those two the form was really quite important. The middle two, Four Winds and Broadway Tower, there’s a stronger argument to suggest that… that they have more, more.. more, more of a purpose. But just before I get distracted I mean, the World War two question, I see what you’re saying. But it’s important to bear in mind that these… These were retrospectives… These functions were retrospectively applied to the buildings they weren’t…They weren’t built to be viewing platforms during the Second World War. I think you could say that that happened because follies often tend to be quite extreme. Again, this notion of emphasising formally how far you can go with form and, and and playing with four means that the buildings are often built in a pretty extreme way. It is this height that towers, so they are useful when you’re practising when you’re trying to look at German planes. Definitely not what Wyatt and what Berners were thinking about when they built it. So yes, the extreme nature of these buildings often means that they are found in retrospective functions, because they’re fun or they are unusual, unusually tall, unusually whimsical, and you should use forward. Yep. So just because they’re given Yes, just because they’re laterally getting functions. I don’t think it means if you said they were built with functions.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to pick on the word whimsical and push you to talk about the first folly, the one which is obsessed with the number three. Obsessed to like, another level. 

Rory Fraser
That’s pretty ACD, isn’t it?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to talk about what…what…what… went behind the construction of that? The only reason I ask is because there are several stylistic references to… I don’t know, like the ongoing architectural movement in the follies. That you can significantly identify each folly to be belonging from one movement or the other. So when you were… used the word whimsical, I’m almost thinking about what…they do, they’re not out of time. You know, they’re not like an acrostic in the sense they are very cognizant of the time that they’re building. Yes, they don’t prescribe the general rules of what the style might prescribe. But they would fit within like the larger discourse on what that style comprises, like for example, like even even the Temple of Four Winds. But again, I don’t want to overstep myself. Let’s begin with the folly which was whimsical and obsessed with the number three. 

Rory Fraser
You know in brief answer to your question. I know what you mean, but the follies in the documentary we’ve chosen partly because they were representative examples of the periods of architectural styles. So the documentary would also serve as a British Standards would serve as a… an example of a development of British Architecture, of architectural history. There are some very, very, very strange, wacky follies which absolutely do not adhere to the period styles which I didn’t include. They’re much more useful to talk about. So, and perhaps not quite as interesting, as I say, if one is watching a documentary, not only to learn about follies, but also to learn about architecture. On the temple of..sorry the Rushton Triangular Lodge. What would you want to know about it? I mean, there are lots of lots of things to say. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So because this is a podcast, most people are going to be listening to it. How about you give us like an audio tour of what the place is like? 

Rory Fraser
Well, Rushton Triangular Lodge is an Elizabithian building meaning that it was built in the… in the late 16th century. It is basically very old. It is a triangular building, a two storey, triangular two build, possibly three storeys if you include the gables. It’s quite big because it’s about the size of a bus. It consists of interlayered ironstone stone and I think limestone? So the ironstone is this sort of red-y colour. The limestone is a sort of whitish colour. It’s a sort of chequered, coloured orange and white and it’s covered in symbolism. It’s covered in dragons and four leaf… three leaf clovers and strange biblical images, quotes of Latin, numbers, not to mention very, very odd windows consisting of blue glass spheres, triangles, all sorts of things. So that’s the outside and each of those items or things all denote and relate to the patron, interesting Catholicism. It was built at a time when in England it was illegal to be Catholic. It’s just become illegal to be Catholic during what we call the Reformation, Tresham, Thomas Tresham was very unhappy about this. He was very rich, he’s very aristocratic, very powerful, but he refused to convert to Protestantism, which lost him all his power and influence and wealth. And he was arrested, he was imprisoned for helping to hide a famous priest. When he was in prison, he designed this folly as a sort of symbol of defiance really, and also sort of something to keep him occupied. He liked designing, he was clearly very bored in prison. And then he built it when he left prison. So it’s, it’s covering all this imagery to do with this Catholicism.Some of them are biblical images. Some of the Latin are less and quotes from the Bible. And the proportions all relate to Biblical things to say the walls, especially are thirty- three feet long which was the age when Christ died. Obviously, the three obsession with three relates to the trinity which is a specifically Catholic thing, well, not specifically that it’s a strong.. It’s a thing strongly associated with Catholicism, and it’s also a joke because his name is Thresham, the first letters which are press. So it’s a little sort of edamame pump. So yeah, it’s… it’s a very interesting building where the form is completely dominant really. There were no doubt functions to the lodge, the inside is whitewashed. It’s very simple. We don’t really know what it was used for. Could have been a house for a rabbit keeper. It could have been a place for secret church services. It could have been a place for meditation or prayer, or work with a bit of a banqueting house, which was very common at the time. So we don’t really know. But the most important thing is undoubtedly the outside.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I was going to try to find patronage because I think patronage is something that is so integral to the building of the functioning of anything, right? It’s based right patronage that decides what gets done, what is it’s going to be used for and how does it live and how is it to remember and how do you I guess use it but it seems like a lot of the follies that you show us are places where there’s a certain relationship that that the place has with the food like, more often than not, these are places for picnicking, dining, partying, partying quite forcefully because I know two of the follies had these like fancy rooftop places which did host famous people and had some bodies but they will also use for banqueting and this is something we’d spoke about earlier as well as the relationship of any place with food is because maybe just eating is such an inherent bodily function that everybody needs to eat and because all the places that we design need to have some place either to cook or to eat or subsequently to wash or to clean blah, blah, blah. 

Rory Fraser
But I mean, there’s clearly no, I didn’t think that, follies have an obsession to have a preoccupied relationship with foods and the digital organ function. I think it’s more that I mean, I think… I think that there is a in some ways very literal aspects to follies and food in that a lot of fun is especially the early banqueting houses like Rushton Triangular Lodge, for example. Small, exquisite, very detailed and beautiful little things. They’re almost like little cakes, you know they look edible. They’re beautifully carved. You can almost imagine that it’s made of gingerbread frosted with icing and so on. A lot of banqueting houses at the time look like this and and this is partly this edible notion is partly perpetuated because food at the time banquets you would have architecture represented in sugar and maybe it was marzipan, I don’t know if it was around in that  period, but certainly, you know, moulds, jellies, sugars,baking and so on. They create architectural forms out of food, so there’s a sort of weird relationship between the building you’re eating and being represented on the table or that the thing you’re eating, or rather than saying or isn’t being represented.. representing the building that you’re in, but I think that that’s the sort of that’s the less important point than the bigger one which is simply that by and large follies are about fun. Sometimes there are memorials. Sometimes they’re very sad. But they’re all very serious. In the case of Rushton Triangular Lodge, but by and large, they’re about letting go, they’re about having fun. They’re about celebrating beautiful things in life. Art forms, gardens, architecture, love, whatever it may be… the imagination is whimsy, as they said we were talking about earlier, and…and food as well as the things that we tend to love. So good company conversation, etc. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these buildings that are basically associated with life’s good things happen to also be places where we eat a lot. But, yes, I mean follies are often built away from the house, in the garden, a place to escape. They’re built in a very elaborate way, a stupid way.Very lavish, very decadent. Decadence is of course associated with parties and parties are associated with food. As I say it’s… it’s a sort of place to let your hair down in the same way that architectural rules are being broken to create these buildings. I mean to be more specific, more historical. There was a form of banqueting houses. What I’m just describing is probably more to the sort of maybe that later on to the 18th century. Banqueting houses were an integral part of Elizabethan routines. Sure, this probably isn’t rubbish. I mean, follies themselves grew out of banqueting houses in Britain. Banqueting houses are obviously places where you eat. And they, banqueting houses sort of grew out of the house. So they initially came over from Italy. And the idea was that you considered the areas where you would eat either in a garden or often on the roof of the building. So you’d have a meal and you know, or you’d have to admit on the roof, very beautiful, whatever, just considered to be Italian, Roman, so that the British started especially specifically the English, to build banqueting houses on roofs, and the idea is you’re using your Great Hall, often with all your servants, your guests, and then you would retreat for your close friends, your family up onto a banqueting house on the roof, which is very elaborate in Elizabethan houses they were really detailed, really amazing, all the walls and spaces. And you’d have your most expensive course there which was a desert course and that was lots of sugar, lots of spice, glamorous exotic foodstuffs, which you wouldn’t give to everybody that you were having dinner with only your really special guests. So that’s sort of where the banqueting houses begin on the roof, amazing spaces and they use them to look down on geometric gardens from there. But then as time went on… These banqueting houses sort of came off the roofs and into the gardens, and got further and further away from the house. And so there’s this relationship, this intrinsic relationship when it comes to follies with food, but also with this sort of liminality The idea is you’re halfway between the House and the sky in the house and the garden will it’s an otherworldly space, a space intrinsically related to relaxation thought getting away enjoying the company, this kind of stuff, and that’s really the origin of follies as we know them in Britain, and they they develop later on into.. into, you know, temples and those kind of things, which we can talk about later. But that’s the beginning. I mean, you could say that they started with, you know, monastic clusters as, but that, at least insofar as I’ve been able to plot the development of follies, I think banqueting houses is the big sort of Spark moment, sort of set up. It’s not like we didn’t have architecture outside before them but this is when it became very popular, and quite frivolous. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
What do you think happened to the banqueting houses then did they ever evolve into a completely different building type? 

Rory Fraser
Absolutely they did. Yes. Yeah. So as fashions developed and British architectures were English phrases separate architecture, Britain didn’t actually seem to come to be insignificant later, they developed with the developments of architecture. So this idea of in the desert course in the banqueting house, gradually lost fashion, when other fashion and with that architectural design changed, and prevailing tastes became classicism. And so the strange buildings and landscapes which were initially built as sort of otherworldly whimsical spaces to eat in, slowly developed into sort of temples were designed to resemble classical gardens, Roman gardens, and they were still used for picnics, as you said earlier, but this sort of total emphasis on food I think changed a bit, altered. So the folly kind of gets hijacked by the classical agenda gets cast that then gets hijacked by the Gothic agenda and then that gets hijacked by the… folly so called is a dynamic spaces which tend to reflect the prevailing issues or patients of the day, which goes very neatly, back to what we were talking about earlier. When you said that the follies in the documentary seemed to be representatives of where they come from. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
But you know what, I think it’s very fascinating how you got to give it to the follies for having that kind of room to adapt to whatever is coming along its way and I know do show a bunch of these follies at least, I believe it’s it’s a fourth one in the series where it’s still an active part of the community and there’s a lot of dogs there and you know, everybody’s like out and still using it. So maybe that is the advantage of not belonging to a particular archetype as we love to call it and constantly be.. in that phase of being a prototype. That’s always under experimentation that’s always developed by whoever comes to design it. Or lack thereof because one of the guys who designed folly was not even an architect. He was everything but an architect. Is that guy? Sorry, I forgot.

Rory Fraser
Oh, Vanbrugh

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s my favourite, but it was.. it was. Yeah, I think I mean, I’ve been.. I’ve been interested. I’ve always looked at follies. I think it’s very fascinating how it doesn’t fit into any bracket and a lot of architectural theorists have written books about mostly tried to understand Bernard Tschumi, but that’s for another day. If you were to change hats, if you were to extrapolate your research and devise a kit of parts to build your own folly, what would that be? And what would that look like? And most importantly, how would that function?

Rory Fraser
You’ve laid lots of intricate traps for me, haven’t you? And I’m not going to totally go through again to destroy my own definitions and my own products. Well, can I just say this is very pleasurable. It’s a new possible world where I have enough money to design my own folly. It was a lovely exercise in whimsy. Follies are very esoteric. They depend on the patrons what they like and they’re on their route. So what I wanted, I’m afraid actually is quite normative. But as far as I can see, Folly is divided into three camps in terms of their location where they’re set, they’re either in some woods hidden away, you can stumble across, all they’re at the end of an avenue or a view that they sort of act as a focal point for, or they are on a hill, sort of, in some impossibly romantic landscape. They’re not really acting as a focal point so much as a sort of what really, and I think, so I personally would opt for the… for the second option, I think, maybe the end of an avenue I’ve always loved avenues and I think that there’s an interesting relationship between architecture at the end of an avenue and as you move down the avenue you kind of move away from the, from the realm of the house to the garden to the folly and this sort of interesting transition of energy and space. And I would imagine something which is maybe a bit like an orangery when there’s lots of light, which has different uses earlier place to get away so it’s during the day, it’s a study where I work mainly with a nice big desk, which can be turned cunningly into a table and in the evening, it can be used for dining. I want a gas fire or working for the winter. That doesn’t get cold. I also want to portico out in front for the summer so I can read underneath it in the sun, what else it needed. It needed a good sound system for parties. Like a…a projector that I can pull down to film psyche some film screenings in there. What else? Oh, yes, in terms of possibly impossibly in Congress story, some sort of totally made up history. That makes it maybe a sort of ghost story or, or some English King got murdered there or something. I don’t know something totally made up. That kind of you know, made it a place of interest. So I’m not going down that sort of, you know, agonised Catholic sort of theological symbol route. I’m going down the sort of decadent fun route. But I basically wanted a space that fostered that was dedicated to Well, I think that the good things in life. So the art forms, time with friends, family, that kind of thing.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Can I catch you here? Yeah. It’s interesting how in your show you say the form is the function and yet while describing your folly, you only described functions. Did you realise that? 

Rory Fraser
Yes, I know. Well, yes. Yes, and because all the things that I’ve been describing take place within this folly.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But you never yet describe what the folly would look like except like a little reference to an orangery.

Rory Fraser
I said, it has a portico and I said that it has large windows. And it’s the end of an avenue, which I think is all the description that you need.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But hey, if it…if it’s going to be at the end of an avenue, you probably want to be sizably big so that it’s visible from like a little bit of distance. You might want to paint it pink like the hippo that you mentioned earlier in the episode.

Rory Fraser
Garish I don’t know. I mean, I Well, I clearly would have imagined it as some sort of temple, rather boring, classical temple, I’ve sort of slide away from describing it like a temple because I don’t want to typecast myself as a classicist. But I think what imagining is some kind of classical temple with a big role in it that basically can be used for a variety of different fun things. So no, I did think I have described something which is crucially well I what I have described as not a space where the form is dictated by the function. Rather, I have described an ambiguous form where many functions can take place.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, whatever makes you sleep, tonight.

Rory Fraser
I feel like I’m quite proud of myself. That was quite clever. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
But you know what, there’s two things you can do. One is of course, you can sketch one because you are wonderful when it comes to painting and can use drawing and watercolours as a medium to probably draw your own folly, or as of today, there are two artificial intelligence AI is where you can just describe your folly as a writer, and maybe the AI will generate for you, you know, just for fun we should try it. Just end of the avenue, orangery, portico and maybe just see what the AI gives us for that. That could be a fun exercise like a folly that’s not even designed by humans anymore. follies in the 21st century and 2022 can be designed by just AI just like putting them into Midjourney and it gives us a folly. Maybe that’s the future of follies, you know they’re not designed by humans. 

Rory Fraser
Well, that’s a very interesting point. Yes, I mean, quite possibly, I mean, follies now are still alive and well, but again, they you know, they reflect current fashions and well, not always they’re often quite anachronistic, but they do often reflect current fashions and and that is, of course, for you know green architecture and renewable architecture and so on. And there are a lot of really cool, dynamic sort of green garden buildings being put up that are so perfectly in tune with the landscape that you will always not notice them, but they’re really amazing. And that sounds like I sort of imagined housings and sort of, you know, Hobbit homes from Lord of the Rings, green turf roofs and have bucolic people gardening around them. But I think follies are a fascinating thing to study because, and indeed looking to the future won’t be relatively constant or happen because because they’re small, they’re easy to get your head around. They’re not massive things. And they’re fairly consistently in gardens and that kind of thing so you know where to find them. And although that they’re that …they’re interesting, because what may be used for hasn’t changed massively over the centuries, the way that they look really has. So it’s a wonderful way of charting, architectural history and history of fashion and souls that uses insofar as they haven’t really changed and I think that’s because people haven’t really changed. I mean, the things that we enjoy doing and enjoy using buildings for exactly the same as they were 1000 years ago. But you know, broadly speaking, they are, it isn’t certainly the case of the folly I’ve just been describing, you know, I would imagine something which was a focal point in this garden that was hopefully a focal points for the arts as well, I mean, as I’ve just described in the film and reading paintings, because so that kind of thing going on with it. And a kind of magnets for stories of it’s got this sort of fake collections attached to it, maybe and hopefully there’ll be more stories and legends attached to this building. Another thing I often say about follies that wouldn’t probably be true in this case, is it might be a bit of a speech, but maybe there’ll be a way of incorporating something contemporary into it. They’re catalysts for architectural innovation because they’re places where rules don’t have to be obeyed. Architects often feel free to experiment. And the documentary one sees that repeated theme and I know you said that they’re often quite normative. That’s true. But equally, they’re often pushing certain trends. Sure. So with Rushton Triangular Lodge, it has some fairly obvious classical features, which are about 100 years ahead of their time. With Vanbrugh’s Temple of Four Winds, It’s a very Baroque temple, imitating Villa Rotonda in Italy, built in the early 18th century, really before follies kicked off properly. With Broadway Tower, it’s a sort of strawberry Gothic folly, which is really kind of heralding the announcements of the Gothic in England, when it’s still a it’s a pretty pretty early phase. And with Berners, well Faringdon Towers are quite difficult because really there’s not much going on there is just a huge sort of orange tower but even then, I mean, it’s architecturally completely eccentric. Yeah, it doesn’t follow any rules. At all. But that… that question is just about aesthetics and more about personality. But I think each of them, in their own way, are pushing boundaries.

Vaissnavi Shukl
For sure. Yeah. I was never really questioning their bold approach towards building, I just meant the way that each of these follies kind of given a nod to the time period in which they were built. They were not necessarily ancient or too forward looking. But they did push the envelope in terms of the time in which they were built and if it makes sense. No, okay. Okay. In true folly sense. It doesn’t make sense. Okay. I just want to say that all these follies I’m by no means saying that they’re as normative as normal, functional buildings like palaces, houses, administrative building courthouses, blah, blah, blah. They did push the boundary in terms of the time period within which they were being built, but they did give a slight nod to that context. They were not necessarily to. They were not trying to be to ancient looking or mimic a separate style that existed before or, nor were they that futuristic, in a sense, you know, they were not really trying to break out of the stylistic bubble in which they existed, like there was still you could probably see the building and take clues from it and place it in like a chronological order. Does that still make sense?

Rory Fraser
Well, yeah, yes, and no. I mean, Broadway Tower would, to the untrained eye,  look like it was older than Rushton Triangular Lodge because it’s a mediaeval castle. But as we all know, that was a… that was a fashion for the Neo Gothic, Gothic, you know, 200 years later, longer than that. But yes, I know what you mean.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I can be wrong. It’s okay. That’s fine.

Rory Fraser
But as I said, I That’s partly to do with having chosen follies that were representative of their periods, which are other examples, which are just completely inane. And question marks that we don’t really know much about. I mean, Jack the Treacle Eater, is, theoretically a late 18th century folly in Somerset; we didn’t know anything about it. Preston tower, one of the first follies in the UK in 1578. I think it’s a tower with a banqueting house at the top but again, you don’t really know why it was built.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I also come from a more rational, practical point of view where you do have to consider at the end of the day, it’s a building and it’s built with a certain set of materials that were available at the time and a certain set of labour skill, that skill existed at the time. So the engravings might be closer to those that were being used at the time or whatever it is in terms of like, the arts and crafts and the skills and the, you know, stone smith’s, who would have been working or the blacksmith who might have been working so in that sense, I do get that. I don’t want to stretch you too thin and don’t don’t want to go off topic.

Rory Fraser
It’s very interesting. I’d have been able to find the reason before, I think it’s a really cool thing. I mean, I know what you mean, I do really know what you mean. I think there are some follies which are really eccentric, and others which aren’t some which were built to be eccentric, others don’t well, I mean, it really depends, but I mean, I think to go back to Rushton Triangular Lodge to us, as people who interested in architecture, it looks relatively normal for Elizabeth building, but someone in you know 1595 If they’d seen that they were seen absolutely astonished. I mean, they would not have known what that was about. So it’s important not to sort of read these buildings in parallel with the buildings that came after them, and thereby forget how normal they were at the time, but they tend to announce trends before they happen. Rather than totally evade trends in my experience, I think unless the… unless the patron or the owner was… was seriously etcetera.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So what’s next for you now? So we got a book done, and we have a show that’s already fantastically produced and very well made and also really fun to watch you know, sometimes it can get a little like overwhelming when you see something like Oh my God, there’s so much information to absorb, but I found it very easy to watch. Like it was good. It was fun in the true folly sense. So now what are we up to?

Rory Fraser
Well, that’s a very kind of documentary and the book, I divide my time between three things. I write to paint and present, as my website puts it. I mean, it’s a question of short and medium and long term activities. So in the immediate term, I do a lot of painting, run a small business painting architecture commissions, which I knock out relatively frequently. And I enjoy doing that because it keeps my eye and for looking at architects and people about architecture. So that’s one thing I do doing in the sort of the medium term I am plotting with Andrew, a wonderful cameraman and producer of Follies to make more documentaries, we’re thinking about different things, exploring different ideas, and and trying to work out what would be most popular, most interesting was doable. So our next project isn’t a medium term thing and it’s very exciting. I do really… really enjoy presenting and making documentaries. It’s a very rewarding experience to see your text words prose, you know being translated onto the screen, especially for a medium that is so well designed for architecture and in film I mean, architecture is just great when put on camera. And then for the long term I also write so I’m… I’m beginning another writing project now, which is very exciting. A second book about architecture, architectural history, which is very exciting and very nerve wracking. So I can’t talk too much, otherwise, I’m going to psych myself out. But it’s great. Again, it’s about history, it’s about the past and it’s a bigger book than the follies book. It’s not it’s it’s more perhaps more serious, that cover that requires lots of lots of trips to the library. So yeah, sort of short, medium and long term activities.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So we’ll wait for you to finish the project that you’re not disclosing right now. And then hopefully we can have you back again to talk about the book.

Rory Fraser
Yes, this cross.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Rory, I do want to thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure having you and I think also big shout out to Andrew thank you so much for making this happen.

Rory Fraser
Pretty well. Thank you very much for having us, it has been absolutely wonderful. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.