A DEEPER RECESS 011: an interview with Louis Pohl Koseda

11 August 2025

Welcome to the 11th edition of A Deeper Recess, the bi-monthly newsletter from recessed.space focusing on a single interview with a leading architect or artist — or in this instance, both in one!

Please remember that this newsletter can only exist with reader support. The sister newsletter The Recess will remain free for all subscribers, while this newsletter is for reader supporters – the interview will appear on recessed.space down the line, but as a supporter you can read the full piece at publication AND have the satisfaction of supporting independent journalism.

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 HERE.

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: