Social Bricks: An Interview about the Social Foundations of Architecture

In this interview, I talk to Emma Nielsen, Mille Sylvest and Nicolai Carlberg from Carlberg – a small Copenhagen based agency specialized in promoting and evaluating social sustainability in the built environment. We center around what they term ‘social bricks’ – an approach to the built environment that starts with knowledge about how architecture affects socially vulnerable and/or neurodivergent people. We talk about how social science methods can be used to adapt the built environment to support people in their thriving, recovery, or reintegration into society depending on their situation. Inevitably, we come to talk about what interdisciplinarity means to them in their work, and how they see current trends towards interdisciplinarity from the point of view of working with welfare architecture.