Running until 18 April at our recessed.space gallery in the iconic James Stirling-designed No.1 Poultry, the exhibition Metafictions of Post-Post-Postmodernism is a group show of 22 artists all deconstructing ideas of the City of London’s physical, public, market architecture. It’s curated by architect and artist Louis Pohl Koseda and includes his own work that so richly explores the politics, power, and economics of both private and public realms. Here we republish an interview with the artist originally published in August 2025 on our reader-supported newsletter, undertaken at his solo exhibition at Christies, London, following the award of the Christies Award from the Royal Drawing School.

Details of the exhibition can be found on the Hypha Studios website: Metafictions of Post-Post-Postmodernism

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This interview was originally published in July on A Deeper Recess, the reader-supported newsletter from recessed.space that runs parallel to the free news update bulleting, The Recess, delivered straight to your inbox, available HERE.

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Having studied architecture at the University of Sheffield, Louis Pohl Koseda began to develop socially-minded, ethical & community engaged projects rooted in his view of the world & upbringing as a Hare Krishna. In 2015, with Jamie Wilde & Samuel Atkinson he co-founded the Foodhall Project in Sheffield, a project that costed less than £5k worth of construction waste to build a kitchen & café that used 50kg of waste food to feed 200 people a week alongside public events & opportunities for community organising.

Foodhall was awarded the 2017 RIBA McEwan Award for Architecture for Social Good & Koseda followed this with a National Food Service strategy in 2020 to help the elderly & vulnerable with emergency food provision during COVID, a project he has written about HERE.

Sadly, after COVID, the Foodhall was forced to close down with rising energy costs one of the factors, but its ideas & impact is felt in other projects, including Koseda’s contribution to the 2021 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Overseen by Madeleine Kessler and Manijeh Verghese of Unscene Architecture, Koseda’s ideas around open public eating were incorporated into an element of the installation designed by long term collaborators, Studio Polpo – a project that was also presented in London in 2020, which we covered on recessed.space (see 00029).



Having graduated from the Royal Drawing School’s postgraduate level course in 2023, Koseda now concentrates on his artistic practice. His works, which vary from small sketches to intricate, huge images, deal with his deep concerns of social good, the civic environment & how financial capital intersects with the built environment. A solo exhibition at Christies, London, in February pulled several of his recent works together in The Dawn of the Golden Age, weaving strands of the current neoliberal landscape with ancient Hindu & Christian texts within fine-line drawings that demand deep attention & exploration.



We started the conversation in the second room, which focused on a series of small drawings seemingly from the artist’s own life, acting as a biographical archive to introduce some of the key themes that enter Koseda’s art & architecture:

In this work, filling the second gallery spaces in your Christies show, you have created a Hogarthian journey through your life. So how does this drawing fit into how you see the world and your life? Is it a diaristic project or is it something speaking to broader utopian thinking and design?

I guess it's about the basis of what it means to draw. In architecture school, you're taught that drawing is a way of thinking – you think with your hand, trying to figure something out for your brain. There’s an idea that maybe we evolved using our hands to solve problems, and that means the way we use our hands helps our imagination or sparks something to help us solve problems. Some people might choose to write about societal things in articles, but my first language is drawing, which I've just been doing continuously since I was very young. I think it was really for me this second room was a way of exploring my own history, I just started drawing things from my past.

So, it was less diaristic, but it was looking back as a reflective act?

When you're drawing every day, your subconscious starts pushing what it needs to express, because it becomes less a conscious activity but just becomes itself. I started this big drawing, Losing Reality Slowly, to talk about housing estates. I was drawing these figures individually on this paper then realised they were actually a representation of the people I knew growing up.

I also remember this kind of feeling of camaraderie living on the council estate, where essentially everyone had this - which no one talks about, but mothers used to say – overarching fear that your children will get taken away from you if you act badly. There's a kind of child-capture world under it all, there's the estate as a physical estate, but there's also a mental housing estate, which is something architects grapple with and think about a lot.



We know we make physical architecture, but there's also these institutions and worlds around it all that that are managed, and the social construct of these areas matter just as much as the physical space. So, I kind of started to think about these different housing estates and the kind of surreal reality, when you've got no way to win, when you're in a situation under pressure, you do things like graffiti or climb over the roofs. But then here's a graphic scene that was the fear that people felt there. And people, when they don't feel like they've got a father figure or they don't feel like there's protection, will start trying to create an identity for themselves in different ways, to represent themselves in different ways, to produce space and produce the city in a different way - it's relational. When I studied architecture, it became something that I looked a lot, about how these things are thought about.

And this is also an area you give thought to in your architectural work, including receiving the RIBA McEwan Award for Architecture for Social Good in 2017 for the Sheffield Foodhall, so it's rooted in all that you do.

Exactly, my personal experience is present. You can't just go "there's a problem, I'm gonna solve it.” Given the problems you personally understand, you also understand what you might have the potential to try and solve.

So, you're present. And, I mean, you're literally present these drawings, but in all your other creative work, including architecture, you also are.

In the architecture work, yes. The Foodhall Project and also the National Food Service were both looking at how to create new forms of social space, essentially how to build reciprocal community where there was a lot of social isolation. A propositional way to do that is through social eating and free public community learning, which is an ancient cultural thing to do.

And which was also present in your childhood culture.

Yes, I was a Hare Krishna, a British Hindu, so food was big, big part of my understanding of different cultures. There might be these very tense and difficult topics that maybe you can kind of inverse and solve somehow, a desire or drive to try something. I think that's the basis of the social architecture work, my own experiences. But the project ended just after COVID, which was a bit heart-breaking.

Sadly, just at the time people could come back together and sit around the table again.

Yeah, but it kind of got over-funded, so a bit got taken away. It was a bit like a splash, a wave, and then it plateaued. I decided for my own wellbeing that I would just focus on drawing.

So since then you've not been working on architecture. Is the process between drawing and architecture different for you? Because clearly, whatever the creative output, both come from a place of observed inequality for you.

The process is actually exactly the same. Drawing is always the initial study for my architecture, because that's your mode of thinking. So, you do an initial study, you might show the contextual priorities in place, you might show the historic thematic aspects, and then you would start to think about a physical site and location in relation to those programmatic elements.

This whole exhibition could really be seen as a series of initial studies surrounding certain key themes that I encounter. They aren't necessarily going to lead to a build proposition, but I thought it was quite interesting that architects normally have this idea that the finished thing is a building, but it's been quite liberating for this particular series to ask if we can start and end with the thematic study, and it finishes as a piece of art for the world.



Because of your aesthetic and your process of making, how do you know when something is finished? Because in each image there is a lot of emptiness and void, and some other sketches just dissipate into nothing.

You have to leave space. You can see the composition, the relationships are going on there. From afar, this is an abstract piece, you don't need to understand all of the things going on inside, but then, when you look more closely, you can find technical detail. I guess I know when I've finished based on time.

And I notice that this is how you determine the price for the works as well, by how many hours spent working on a piece.

I think that's quite important. I also think it's important here in Christie's, because often we talk about artwork as a highly speculative thing, but what about if we price it in terms of days of labour spent making it.

And, of course, architecture is not very good at valuing itself that way either.

I think it’s fair way of doing it. It was very difficult to think how to price these works. Maybe someone else in the future can price them higher – or lower – but the only way I can price them is based on how long I've worked on them. People can see value on top of that, and that's the basis of something called fair pay, you know. So, there you go. But I think that it's part of the positionality of being Christies, putting a price into the system like that is quite important because people don't really do it in the arts. And I think the question is, "why?"

And of course, this idea of economy and equality goes through your work. This piece in front of us now, a work called Capital, is very much about that I see the architecture of the City of London lottery, and I see bankers falling out of the bar Dirty Dicks in the evening?

Essentially, if we look 300 years ago, there was a representation of system, where patronage was a church, and the church commissioned architecture, imagery, and all sorts of things. Today, it is financial sector that does it. So there's a mixture of worlds going on here, where I think I'm effectively correctly talking about economic things, not in a left or right wing sense, but about the economics that is there already.

So, it's a form of observation, of journalism, but without bias or political agenda.

I think that's what's interesting. You can read economic books and you read the conversations going around in economics, and the belief is that competition is the key to lots of things in society – and that's an interesting thing to draw! I just think that as soon as art became involved in economic conditions, and the economy started to define the parameters of art and architecture, we stopped representing things so figuratively.

I think it's because maybe people could get a really firm grasp of what is going on in a religious world, and we could represent these religious mythologies. But the economic mythologies have been scarcely represented, because the idea is the economy sets the value of art or architecture, and that's the sum total of the engagement with the topic. But it's much more interesting to open that Pandora's box and just see if we can we talk about it in the work.



So, this work  The Capital at Risk Drawing the City of London is a document of the City of London and the sort of the free-market capitalism which created the place and people today?

Yeah, how lending structures actually work. Here, you can see who is trading, you see economic figures like kings and representing the International Monetary Fund. Here you can see the Bank of England giving the giving the retail bankers money. Here they're giving collateral to the lending in the form of a house – which is where people access the money, because if you want to raise money to fit out a shop or something you take the loan out on your house. there's a relationship between that money and the invisible hands and narratives of competition work and the relationship of the City of London on global trade like, you know – and also things like alcohol. So, this is a really familiar scene to all of us, really.

Like the BBC series Industry.

Exactly! And actually, I find this more relatable than most things, weirdly. It's the High Street, you get out of Liverpool Street Station and you don't see this physically, you just see a bunch of people, but mentally, you kind of see this.

I've been on a few night busses past Liverpool Street at around two in the morning, and it is exactly this Hogarthian scene.

It's actually how it is! But then you also start imagining what's going on in these buildings.



So when you start your drawings, which you describe as an extension of your thinking, do you have a map of what it may eventually look like, or does it evolve as you work?

It's the same as architecture. You go to a place, you find out what's going on there, and you immerse yourself. I mean, good architecture has come from an immersion context and I actually think good art does that too. I think that if I immerse myself in a context, I can understand all of the little nuances that are going on there, the physical, social, mental nuances. And if you're not designing building, you can just express it through these mad figures. I think that's where the interaction between architectural drawing and fine art is, because if you look at this drawing, there's an important relationship in the language of drawing.



The language of drawing in England was based on smithing armoury, which led to print making in the 1500s, which then eventually led to the book. Illustrations and books were our largest artistic export ever, we didn't really create paintings that much and the way we represent architecture comes from the print making technologies and techniques we had available. We continued to make drawings, but places like the Royal Academy tried to make this kind of language deeply unfashionable around the 1920s, they would kind of say "everything should be painting," but in architecture we kept on drawing until the late 1970s.



I was taught by people who are masters of drawing in architecture at Sheffield School of Architecture. People like Mark Parsons taught me in first year and I was fortunate that Simon Chadwick had just joined and made every student spend the entire second year hand drawing, returning to craft is a gift and a subversion of the normal ‘digital everything’ approach. A genius, Mark Emms, taught me in third year, and accelerated my drawing skill even more, while Peter Blundell jones taught me how to draw with an anthropological eye. This meant I did my entire undergraduate exclusively using hand drawing

This continuous unbroken thread of learning and training that goes not just back through architecture history, but back through print making history, and back to the smithing industry. It's building on that history of the language of drawing, but it's also kind of reinventing, and questioning. It's building on that history, but it's also kind of reinventing, and questioning if contemporary art has a place for this kind of work rooted in the vernacular lineages of language.

So, you're drawing inspiration from Hogarth, you've mentioned Piranesi, Baroque, and classical forms, or do you not boil it down to direct referencing?

Well not even Hogarth really, it just comes from. I restrict myself to the tool and that's what comes out from the tool. I will continuously draw in this super, super fine line work and this is what evolves from that. Essentially, by doing that, you force yourself to think about every blade of grass, every single piece of hair on someone's head, and by drawing something you understand how things are made.

If you are deeply engaged with drawing, you start to understand anatomy well, how anatomy works, how people's muscles work, and if you scale up, you see how the world is made, how a building is made. If i draw some brickwork, I have to do it to scale, and you can start to see how it's constructed – I need to understand how the building is made in order to draw it. I couldn't draw it if I didn't try to understand it, and I couldn't draw this door moving like this if I didn't understand how the anatomy underneath it worked, and I couldn't draw the clothing on a person's body if I didn't understand how the fabric moved, how the wind moved, and the fluid dynamics in it all work.

So, there's an element of drawing as learning and I think that is something taught in architecture schools. But I also think it's widely not valued and understood, if you throw drawing away, you stop thinking about how things work and you throw away an immense human possibility, which we should fight for and strive to keep. So, there's a hopefulness in it, although it's often dystopia.

In your video, in the final room here at Christies, you say that we don't know if we're heading towards a utopia or dystopia.

This is where the kind of gold Dawn of the Golden Age comes in. So, the Dawn of the Golden Age is essentially that before COVID, it was almost like the end of history, and then after COVID there's this feeling of multiple dawns of the golden age for multiple things: The golden age for America, there's the golden age of China, the golden for India. There's also a mythological significance, because there's a belief. It's something I thought was an important point in time, and I decided on the name maybe last year, then there's a whole new narrative of the American Golden Age is here. It's interesting that that is a time we are living through, it's a time of hope but then there's an immense dystopian link.

The question of a golden age is for whom is it the golden age?

Yeah, a golden age for who, but also how. How is it going to be golden, it is just rhetoric or are we actually transforming the world into a new dawn. I actually end on a quite hopeful, I'm quite hopeful because I have seen struggles that are – and this is where it becomes a little bit surreal and this is territory which is quite difficult to talk – but there's an image there like a struggle between Mies van der Rohe and classicists and how people get caught in a crossfire of discourse. And I, you know, like there's a man tripping over a rock holding the Seagram Building, but drawn in a way classicists would probably criticise, but it becomes slightly quirky and surreal that it's happening all at once.

Within the melee of these binary ideas of the future, you are looking into the chaos and discussion.

And the chaos is quite interesting! And the discussion is probably the only imagery we can really make from it - because, over the last five years everyone was talking about the future, whether 2050 or 2090, speculating on everything. Speculation was seen as a really good thing to bring into artistic or architectural discourse, but I think that there's an alternative lens which is about operation, and the relationship between the operative now and a speculative future, but everybody is speculating on there being a golden age. It's definitely like post-COVID has been a new era.

There's the one image that is quite important in this series, an image essentially about AI. It talks about how AI is leading to a mad world, with ideas that there may be a worker uprising, a fight to the death, that maybe the arts are going to be completely destroyed during the process, perhaps robots will be running all over the place. There are a million possibilities and none of them are utopic any more, because people are seeing self-service checkouts, how the internet is turning everyone into prostitutes, that internet trolls are having enormous fights with each other.

What I land on within this series is the idea of Gödel's theorem – mathematical proof by a theoretical physicist which defined objectively that there's a limit to the growth of artificial intelligence and to what artificial intelligence can do that humans have the capacity to do so. He was profoundly respected by people like Einstein, and essentially he showed that humans are able to see multi-scalar things, and that while an artificial intelligence has to use a database, for some reason humans can move just beyond their database and think in a wider sense and different at different scales. It also means that we humans are uniquely capable about of seeing non-obvious relationships. Artificial intelligence can see obvious relationships, patterns and orders which make buildings and things like that, but it can be seen as a freeing moment as well, one that gives us this non-obvious new art.



Your drawing is an example of this, I don't mean the content but the very act of doing, the act of drawing allows your ideas to emerge and unexpected encounters to occur.

Exactly, and it's a post artificial intelligence method, because we can actually decide to make causal relationships, or narrative based relationships, and AI will struggle with multiple scales of detail.

As you said earlier, as you're drawing you are pulling references and ideas without consciously being aware of, but AI would know exactly where it develops its pattern from.

AI would have direct references but somehow humans can just step up, step down, step around and do weird things that AI can't and probably won't ever be able to do. Roger Penrose says they probably won't be able to do that for a couple of 100 years, at least.

The risk is, with your optimism that the other golden ages for people like Elon Musk or other tech-utopianists, is that AI does just enough for them to control certain other systems – economic, political, even architectural. They are not interested in the scope of human possibility, they're only interested in the scope of a capacity to control.

That's the interesting thing. The scope of this world we're moving through is an informational overload world that although people like Musk or others who are really interested in seeing the expansion of AI might potentially colonise huge parts of human imagination, just from the artistic perspective there's an enormous question, which I think Gödel has already answered, about where we're going in the arts. I think that the arts will see a very different framework of existing after AI, and think that the arts will probably be richer for it, even though there's going to be more trouble in the world, there's an important value in the arts.

And you include architecture within the arts?

Social architecture, human stories and so on, is really difficult for AI to create. I think there'll be an enormous amount of data driven architecture that will evolve, but I think that it will maybe clarify certain areas for us. Maybe people don't want to be making window schedules, so maybe let AI take tasks like that, but really honing in on the parts of human intelligence that worth holding dear in a post-AI world. I guess that's the thing about the golden age of artificial intelligence, and one of the key realities of this show, is we are now in that universe, and this art is to some degree responding to it!



There'll always be room for the human hand and drawing, where the role of the artist is to be slightly away from but close enough to understand detail.

And as we think through drawing, there's always a human relationship in drawing. It gives a question about globalisation, that maybe drawing is more valuable? A painting can disguise loads of stuff, you can hide the fact you don't know much about all sorts of things, whereas with drawing you always reveal what you don't know. You always give away what you don't know, everyone can always see your mistake, especially with drawings in ink for which you have to force yourself to be focused on. There's an economist called Gabriel Tarde who spoke about three ideas of what value is: the first thing is beauty, maybe it can kind of have some utility, but the third thing was knowledge. And he believed that these fundamental factors are proven, because when someone tries to destroy those things, such as a library, people rush to save it because that's where it lies.

So there's a question, drawing can be very beautiful, but it also holds a lot of knowledge. Architectural drawing holds knowledge, it's catalyst and also works at a more fundamental level. Leonardo Da Vinci knew this, he implicitly knew this was the case and it's why he made more drawings than paintings. He knew that you could just take a drawing up a level, and then everyone would be like "wow, it's a painting!" But, the hard part is keeping it in the drawing. I can show you a series of plans, and you might say, "that's fantastic building, it's great." Drawings have that capacity which I think is a bit of a difference in positionality.