Tired of all those repetitive Pritzker-prediction lists? Always those same, predictable bigly names, and when was the last time they actually got it right? It's time to cut through all the crap and go straight to the source to get the info — the ones who operate at a higher level than any listicle or explainer-piece could. So we asked a psychic. After a quest to find a future-seer who would let me record the reading, I (Amelia) ventured deep into the depths of Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood...
Dec 19, 2016•11 min
Shortly after Grafton Architects won RIBA's inaugural International Prize for their UTEC campus in Lima, Peru, I spoke with the firm's director, Yvonne Farrell, to get the backstory to the project and discuss how the award might affect the firm in the long run. As an academic building, UTEC joins a rich collection of other institutional projects by the Dublin-based Grafton....
Dec 12, 2016•24 min
Missed out on Next Up: The LA River , Archinect Sessions' podcasting event? Now you can listen to the whole thing, released in two parts on One-to-One. Last week, we released the first half of the interviews, and this week we've got the rest. This week's playlist of live recordings features interviews with: Lou Pesce (designer with Metabolic Studio) Julia Meltzer (director and founder of Clockshop, a non-profit arts organization) and Elizabeth Timme (co-director of LA-Más) Renee Dake Wilson (par...
Dec 05, 2016•55 min
Missed out on Next Up: The LA River , Archinect Sessions' live podcasting event? Now you can listen to the first half all at once, on One-to-One. Next week we'll release the full second-half. This playlist of live recordings features interviews with: Frances Anderton (host, KCRW’s DnA) and Christopher Hawthorne (architecture critic, Los Angeles Times ) Steven Appleton (co-founder, LA River Kayak Safari) and Catherine Gudis (co-founder, Play the L.A. River game) Marissa Christiansen (Executive Di...
Nov 29, 2016•45 min
Through their work as visual strategists for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Delgado and Daniel Goods inspire scientists and make science inspiring. Under 'The Studio' at JPL, David and Dan help engineers and scientists sort through their own design problems using creative methodologies, while also framing JPL's research for a general audience—making things like travel posters for exoplanets and helping realize a giant listening station for orbiting satellites. David and Dan sat down wit...
Nov 15, 2016•47 min
Never Built New York , by curators and authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, is an astounding collection of architectural projects that never made it into being. The book features projects from the last two centuries, sited all throughout the five boroughs, that range from the monumental to the mortifying. Alongside infamous projects like Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Manhattan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Key Plan for Ellis Island, visions for an alternate New York-urbanism abound: aborted reflectio...
Nov 07, 2016•36 min
Paul and Amelia are joined in-studio by the co-founders behind RotoLab, Michael Rotondi's new start-up. Along with Nels Long and M A Greenstein, Rotondi has ambitions to create uniquely VR-environments for architectural education and practice, and in the process, completely upend how we learn and work. Inspired by decades of experience in architecture and VR’s imminent future, Rotondi and his co-founders spoke about socializing in VR, gaming as education, and what this new frontier could mean fo...
Oct 31, 2016•50 min
You probably don’t recognize George Tsypin’s name, but you’re almost certainly familiar with his projects. After training as an architect in Moscow, Tsypin moved to New York to study theater design, and it’s now safe to say millions upon millions of people have seen his work. He’s designed stage sets for the MTV VMA’s, operas, Broadway plays, and the 2014 Winter Olympics’ Opening Ceremony at Sochi, among many others. Tsypin's work is now captured in GEORGE TSYPIN OPERA FACTORY: Invisible City , ...
Oct 24, 2016•35 min
Aside from their role as workshop co-chairs for the ACADIA conference, this week's One-to-One guests are both architects who work and teach at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. Their focus on fabrication led them to their roles at ACADIA, with McGee directing Taubman's FABLab and Newell serving as Director of the Master of Science in Material Systems and Digital Technologies. ACADIA stands for the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architectu...
Oct 17, 2016•32 min
The small town of Columbus, Indiana is packed with the works of famous modernist architects, but unlike cities like New York or Chicago, Columbus’s pedigree isn’t so often brought into the national architectural discourse. Exhibit Columbus , a new symposium and exhibition happening annually in the city, is hoping to change that. Deborah Berke , architect and dean at Yale, has worked extensively in Indiana and was a keynote speaker at this year's inaugural Exhibit Columbus symposium. She joined m...
Oct 10, 2016•21 min
Steven Holl is globally renowned for monumental works that specifically invoke light, color and porosity in both programmatic and aesthetic ways. Holl can also be thought of as an artist’s architect—his firm has done work for many arts institutions, he methodically sketches his projects in watercolors, and his style is heavily influenced by art practice and theory. He’s also very interested in the phenomenology of architecture—how it’s sensed by humans, and its impact on our existence. We spoke ...
Oct 03, 2016•33 min
Tomas Koolhaas is a filmmaker in Los Angeles, whose most recent project, a documentary about his father Rem, recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival. REM follows its titular architect around the world, visiting his projects and investigating their human impact. Aware of his special perspective on the film's subject, Tomas didn't want REM to be a teary biopic or heady architectural salvo, but something more impressionistic and accessible, appealing to emotions over intellectualism. We spea...
Sep 26, 2016•37 min
Martino Stierli took over as MoMA's chief curator of architecture and design in 2015, when the museum was already undergoing major changes. Diller Scofidio + Renfro's redesign was underway, and the architecture and design galleries faced something of an uncertain future in the expanded museum layout. On the podcast, Stierli dispels the rumors that the galleries would be closed permanently, and discusses MoMA's strategies for exhibiting architecture, as well as his plans to diversify the museum's...
Sep 19, 2016•30 min
For nearly 30 years, Michael Arbib taught computer science, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, and mathematics at the University of Southern California, and is known for his prolific work on brains and computers: essentially, what the mechanisms of one can teach us about how the other works. Gathering together all aspects of his work, he’s sharpened his focus on the connection between architecture and neuroscience, and developed the concept of neuromorphic architecture. He is now associated ...
Sep 12, 2016•37 min
Kunlé Adeyemi founded NLÉ in Amsterdam and Lagos in 2010, after over eight years at OMA. Raised in Kaduna, Nigeria, with an architect father who was constantly redesigning his childhood home, Adeyemi studied architecture in Lagos before getting an MArch II at Princeton, studying with Peter Eisenman. His work at OMA included pivotal roles in projects such as Lagos’ master plan and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Throughout his work, he focuses on issues of rapid urbanization and climate change in th...
Sep 06, 2016•45 min
Los-Angeles based architect Michael Maltzan may be best known for his multiple residential projects with the Skid Row Housing Trust , and the longer-than-the-Empire-State-Building-is-tall residential mixed user, One Santa Fe . But Maltzan’s office is also designing Los Angeles’ new Sixth Street Viaduct , a since-demolished infrastructural icon of the city that bridged the Los Angeles River between downtown and Boyle Heights. Michael shares his relationship with the growing identity of downtown L...
Aug 29, 2016•33 min
Design/Build with Jersey Devil: A Handbook for Education and Practice is a wonderful mixture of history, interviews, experiments and how-to’s, all focused around the design/build pedagogy and practice of its 1970s pioneers, Jersey Devil. Author Charlie Hailey, who is also an architecture professor at the University of Florida, spoke with me about Jersey Devil's beginnings at Princeton University, and the implications of design/build pedagogy for today’s academic climate. Special thanks to Prince...
Aug 22, 2016•21 min
In the spring of 2015, we ran a Working Out of the Box feature with Abraham Burickson , the practicing architect who founded Odyssey Works—a theater company that produces performances for an audience of one, often lasting days. Participants are extensively researched and the performances are rigorously planned, so that the whole thing unfolds before them spontaneously, as they move about the world. To Burickson, theater and architecture are one and the same—their objective is to immerse the audi...
Aug 15, 2016•25 min
Dora Epstein Jones is the newly minted executive director of the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles. With a doctorate in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism from UCLA, Epstein Jones came to A+D after nearly 15 years at SCI-Arc, where she led the coordination of humanities and theory courses, and served as the founding coordinator of the General Studies program. Now situated in L.A.’s booming Arts District, A+D is neighbor to downtown’s own museum renaissance, not to mentio...
Aug 08, 2016•40 min
Architect Jose Sanchez is the co-creator of Block'hood , a city-building computer game that runs on real city data. Under his practice, plethora-project (covering architecture and indie game development), he focuses on how play can initiate design practice. In Block’hood, players build cities out of 80 preset block types, and are rewarded for thinking “ecologically” and creating diverse cities. Sanchez wanted the game to be accessible to everyone, not just urban planners or architects, and to ul...
Aug 01, 2016•25 min
The Genesis-sized replica of Noah's Ark is just the beginning of Ark Encounter, Kentucky's new biblical theme park managed by the Christian apologist ministry, Answers in Genesis. Troyer Group are the architects behind the ark, with president and chair LeRoy Troyer as the lead architect. I spoke with LeRoy about the challenge of building a project with Biblical construction specs, as well as the inherent controversy of designing something that is meant as a kind of proof of concept for Answers i...
Jul 18, 2016•30 min
Mark Middleton, partner at Grimshaw in London, has been facing the Brexit decision's aftermath like many of his architecture-compatriots —with positive pragmatism. While many architects and design professionals strongly supported "Remain", they have little choice but to #keepcalmandcarryon, while carefully reevaluating how ties with the European Union could affect business, as well as London as a design capital. Middleton joins Amelia Taylor-Hochberg on One-to-One to sort through the current moo...
Jul 11, 2016•22 min
We're taking a break from One-to-One this week to set off fireworks and contemplate the potential future of a Trump Presidential Center. In the meantime, we present some of our favorite episodes related to this big ol' hot mess of a nation. We've got it all: "Traditional" architecture, not necessarily just like Jefferson would have wanted: Building Our Best Nature: Archinect Sessions One-to-One #8 with Scott Merrill, winner of this year's Driehaus Prize The too-common tragedy of mass shootings: ...
Jul 04, 2016•35 sec
In the late 1950s, some of the world's most prominent architects gathered in Berkeley, California, to take part in a landmark psychological experiment on creativity and personality. Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, William Pereira and dozens of other architects were put through a barrage of tests and surveys, to gain a better understanding of what creativity is, and its place in architecture. They also rated one another, and in the process exposed not only exposed their egos honest...
Jun 27, 2016•42 min
Architecture writer and historian Hugh Howard has written many books on American architecture, telling stories that meld design and cultural history together in highly accessible and humanistic ways. His latest book, "Architecture's Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson", tracks the fruitful and contentious relationship between the two architectural frenemies—beginning with Wright’s role in Johnson’s pivotal “Modern Architecture” exhibition at MoMA in 1932, up until Wright’s death in...
Jun 20, 2016•20 min
Elaine Molinar joined founding partner Craig Dykers at Snøhetta's very beginning, when they won their first competition for the Alexandria Library in 1989. Since then, the firm has grown true to its mountainous namesake, expanding to four offices worldwide and winning pivotal cultural projects in architecture and design, among them the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, SFMOMA's expansion, the entrance pavilion at the National September 11 Memorial Museum, and Norway's new banknotes. They both...
Jun 13, 2016•38 min
Writer and BLDGBLOG founder Geoff Manaugh 's latest book, A Burglar's Guide to the City , isn't just a set of case studies on bank vaults and getaway routes—it's a dialectic for public and private space. It’s definitely the first book I’ve come across classified jointly under “architecture” and “true crime”, and it's full of fascinating insights into how burglars exploit architecture to pull off the perfect crime, as well as the extent architects go to prevent that from happening. Geoff spoke wi...
Jun 06, 2016•36 min
Amro Sallam helped start Architects for Society in 2015, gathering together a collective of international architects to focus their work on humanitarian and social-welfare projects. One of their first projects, Hex House, is a solar-powered, single-family unit designed for deployment in refugee camps and other displaced communities. Sallam shared with me the firm’s origin story, their mindset towards architecture’s involvement in humanitarian efforts, and his thoughts on Aravena's Biennale ....
May 31, 2016•27 min
20 over 80: Conversations with Legends of Architecture and Design is the antidote to those breathless, over-hyped lists you’ve seen, trying to predict which baby-faced youngster will be the next big thing in their creative practice. A compilation of unique interviews with such greats as Milton Glaser, Michael Graves, Phyllis Lambert, Jens Risom, Denise Scott Brown and Deborah Sussman, 20 over 80 not only draws a thread through the last century of creative practice, but is also a testament to the...
May 23, 2016•30 min
Today's podcast guests are NBBJ Managing Partner Steve McConnell and John SanGiovanni, co-founder of Visual Vocal, a new company bringing virtual and augmented reality systems to the architecture industry. As an investor in Visual Vocal , NBBJ plans to foster the company in all of its design processes, using its collaborative platforms to communicate among designers, clients, and users, at all stages of project development. With a beta program launching this summer, Steve and John gave me a tast...
May 16, 2016•24 min
