Since North Carolina passed the controversial bill known as HB-2 at the end of March—requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that coincide with the sex listed on their birth certificate, and forbidding city or county legislatures from passing counter-measures that protect against LGBT discrimination—the state has lost an estimated $40 million in business investment, and researchers project that total annual costs due to the bill could tally $5 billion. On May 9, the US Department of Justic...
May 12, 2016•44 min
This week on the podcast, Donna, Ken and Amelia discuss the uncertain future of downtown Atlanta's brutalist Public Library (the last building Marcel Breuer designed), how Shigeru Ban's relief efforts in Ecuador relate to his celebrity, and the emergence of a heavy-hitting lobbyist group for driverless cars in the US. Shownotes : News pieces discussed in this show: Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehicles Shigeru Ban arrives in Ecuador to train locals in re...
May 05, 2016•30 min
This week we’re joined by special guest co-host Aaron Betsky , author of Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire and Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture & the Construction of Sexuality . As a strong presence in the architectural discourse of gender and sexuality since the 1990s, Betsky discusses with us a few of our recent Features published under April's special editorial theme, Sex , including: The enduring influence of "Playboy Architecture" Screen/Print #41: "Family Planning" fr...
Apr 28, 2016•40 min
The sudden death of Dame Zaha Hadid could not also mean the end of Zaha Hadid Architects. With major projects still ongoing all over the world, the firm had to keep things running strong, focusing on the future while managing grief. After working with Zaha for nearly thirty years, Patrik Schumacher has now taken over leadership at the firm, and joins us on the podcast to discuss what it was like collaborating with her "killer instinct", and how he can continue honoring the "DNA" of her work....
Apr 21, 2016•52 min
We're joined by original 'Nector and senior editor Orhan Ayyüce to discuss Zaha Hadid's legacy and his recent piece on LA's industrial urbanism , part of our architectural travel guide through cities worldwide. As a student at SCI-Arc, Ayyüce was first taken aback by Hadid during a visiting lecture she gave in 1985, before she had completed any built work: "I was very impressed by her at that lecture and her strengths and vulnerabilities made a lasting place in my memory bank." We share the impr...
Apr 14, 2016•47 min
Last week we witnessed the loss of Dame Zaha Hadid , one of architecture's most formidable and prolific talents. We'll be devoting a later podcast episode to remembering her and honoring her work. Until then, we'll continue catching you up with the most significant architecture news from the past week. This episode we discuss Alejandro Aravena's Pritzker acceptance speech (and the designs he's giving away for free ), how NASA is experimenting with inflatable space houses , how we "crave" public ...
Apr 07, 2016•55 min
Collecting the most important news of the past week – that is, from the recording date's perspective of March 30th, the day before Zaha Hadid's sudden death – this episode brings stories on: the winning below-grade skyscraper (sinkscrapers?) of eVolo's Skyscraper Competition ; a long-lost Le Corbusier tapestry returning to the Sydney Opera House; another twist on co-habitation in the co-work startup, PodShare ; Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects taking "revenge" on Charles Moore's Hood Museum ...
Mar 31, 2016•1 hr 3 min
This past week on Archinect, we heard Thom Mayne's story of "jazz, sex, and the alienation of singular genius" in Julia Ingalls ' interview with the Morphosis lead, and hypothesized on the future of architectural work in a world of full automation and universal basic income, based on Nicholas Korody 's interview with the co-authors behind Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Both Ingalls and Korody join us on the podcast to delve deeper into these pieces, and share some...
Mar 24, 2016•44 min
While Amelia is away this week, Alexander Walter fills in and joins Ken, Donna and me for a conversation about competitions, in a celebration of the re-launch of our sister site Bustler . In addition to discussing the new website and its new features, we also talk about the controversial new " Border Wall" competition and look at some current competitions worth checking out....
Mar 17, 2016•44 min
Spring is just around the corner, and in the interest of new beginnings and rebirth, Archinect Sessions is taking this week off to get some much needed rest. The market is hot right now, and we're running on all cylinders just to keep up. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode, devoted specifically to competitions in honor of Bustler 's new redesign, and until then, we've got a special half-episode to tide you over. Paul and I run through the recent news and recommend a few episodes to...
Mar 10, 2016•9 min
A new Texas state law going into effect on August 1 will allow concealed handguns to be brought into public university campus buildings. This isn't sitting well with many members of the public university system, as educators and administrators are now tasked with regulating the presence of guns inside studios and classrooms, and fear that such a law will scare people away from the school (not to mention the obvious safety concerns). Dean of the architecture school, Frederick "Fritz" Steiner, has...
Mar 03, 2016•25 min
The tragedy of Flint, Michigan's water crisis seems to worsen with every newly uncovered detail. As a manmade public health crisis provoked by willful denial and compromised safety standards, the entirely preventable poisoning of Flint's water supply with lead stands not only as a failure to care for the citizens of one city, but as a dreadful harbinger for the U.S.'s deteriorating infrastructure networks. Like any concerned citizen, Filnt-based architect Kurt Neiswender sees this as a call to a...
Feb 25, 2016•37 min
We swear, no BIG or Trump on this episode. We discuss the donation of Lautner's breathtaking Sheats-Goldstein house , complete with jungle, nightclub and infinity tennis court, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to become the museum's first acquired piece of architecture (along with a sizable endowment for maintenance). The U.S. saw a major step forward into the realm of driverless cars, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google that its computers in autonomous vehi...
Feb 18, 2016•50 min
Long-time Archinector and reliably sane commentator Will Galloway joins us from his base in Tokyo to discuss the weekly news, including his interview with Assemble , crucially taking place mere weeks before they won the Turner Prize. Otherwise, while news from Bjarke Ingels Group commanded the feistiest comment threads – with renderings of BIG's spiraling Hudson Yards tower provoking debate over craft in skyscrapers, and the firm being selected to design the Serpentine Pavilion for 2016 in their...
Feb 11, 2016•51 min
Virtual Reality is very much here, in all its messy, beautiful, uncanny glory. The gee-whiz factor notwithstanding, the technology holds a bevy of architectural applications and implications, and manages to hold a mirror up to the built environment to show us things that we couldn't understand before. This episode, we discuss a host of recent VR stories, from the narrative VR journalism of Emblematic Group to Thorsten Wiedemann's VR performance art , an AR helmet that streamlines the constructio...
Feb 04, 2016•1 hr 1 min
Back in December of last year, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture launched in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, featuring an exhibition curated by Los Angeles-based critic Mimi Zeiger and designer Tim Durfee. Their show, “Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City,” winner of the Biennale’s Bronze Dragon, reconsiders what makes up today’s idea of a “city”, specifically regarding our digital and virtual presences, as well as contemporary issues of globalized economies. Mimi and Tim joined ...
Feb 03, 2016•1 hr 31 min
For our 50th (!!!) episode, we discuss the biggest news items from the last week – everything from the latest BIG and DS+R shake-ups to a surprisingly controversial Seattle homeless shelter – and it's been a doozy. We take a look at: The "sphincter from which digital art issues" (according to one Archinect commenter), aka DS+R's new Berkeley Art Museum ; the controversy surrounding BIG's latest client (referred to here as the Washington "Pigskins"); recent discussions of diversity issues that ha...
Jan 28, 2016•52 min
As last week's episode was taken up by Pritzker-hooplah, this episode takes a look back at the major news items of the last week(ish) and gets you caught up with what's been happening on Archinect. We discuss: the recent photo exhibition on homelessness at USC (which closes tomorrow!); the Treasury Department's controversial new practice of tracking and identifying secret buyers of luxury housing ; how BIG's 2 World Trade Center is now in limbo after "anchor tenant" Rupert Murdoch has pulled out...
Jan 21, 2016•51 min
When news broke yesterday that Alejandro Aravena was the winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize , reactions were generally positive, but a bit conflicted . Aravena's most known, and cited by the Pritzker, for his work on social housing projects in his home base of Santiago de Chile, where he operates as the executive director of the "do tank", ELEMENTAL . And few would contest that his work is worthy of the prize, despite the fact that he's only 48. But Aravena was also a Pritzker jur...
Jan 14, 2016•43 min
Architect, artist, and experimental preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos has created scents for Philip Johnson's Glass House, removed centuries of dust from the inside of Trajan's Column with latex, and is the newly appointed director of the Historic Preservation program at Columbia University's GSAPP, where he also began the "Future Anterior" journal . And this week, he joins us on the podcast to discuss ideas that he mulls over constantly in his work – what role should originality play in archit...
Jan 08, 2016•54 min
For our final Mini-Session from the Next Up series, Nicholas Korody interviews TOMA, a Santiago-based collective. TOMA build politically-charged social spaces, using design as a strategy for bringing people together rather than as an end in itself. With their installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial , Escuelopolis , the Chilean architects catalogued and mapped the connections between their home-base and the Midwestern metropolis, honing in on the exportation of neoliberalism to South A...
Dec 18, 2015•13 min
'Tis the time of year for reflections and speculations – and 2015 was a big one for Archinect Sessions . We launched our first ever live podcasting series, Next Up , at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles and at the first Chicago Architecture Biennial ; we started a brand new interviews-only show, One-to-One ; and we spoke with some of the biggest names and most compelling up-and-comers in the profession. On this episode, we revisit our predictions from last year's final episode , reflect on th...
Dec 17, 2015•29 min
Over Skype from their homebase in Beijing, WAI Architecture Think Tank partners Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski spoke with Paul Petrunia, on our latest Mini-Session for the Next Up series. Their contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial , a rumination on manifestos, looks to the potential forms of architectural persuasion in any medium....
Dec 12, 2015•14 min
On the happy and historic occasion of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi being jointly awarded the 2016 AIA Gold Medal , we speak with Brown about whether this truly is a watershed moment for architecture, and the long road that she and Robert took to arriving here. We last spoke with Brown on episode #39 , when the Vanna Venturi house hit the market . If we accept that accolades like the Gold Medal have the influence to (potentially) nudge the profession in certain directions, then this time...
Dec 10, 2015•38 min
Nicholas Korody interviews architect Andreas Angelidakis for our next Mini-Session , originally part of our Next Up event at the Chicago Architecture Biennial . Trained at SCI-Arc, Angelidakis is perhaps better known in contemporary art circles than architecture's ( as pointed out by Nicholas in a previous feature here on Archinect), but as proved in his contribution to the Biennial, the context and concerns of his ideas rely on, and contribute to, architectural discourse....
Dec 04, 2015•28 min
At least once in their professional life, every architect is likely to ask themselves, "Should I start my own practice?" From there, there are countless aspects to weigh against one another, but it begins as a very personal question – what do I want to create, and where? Longtime Archinector (and tiki-drink enthusiast) David Cole began a discussion in the forum to mull over such questions for himself, as he considers whether to start a firm in his hometown of Cincinnati, or brave new territory i...
Dec 03, 2015•28 min
Architect and experimental preservationist Bryony Roberts joins us for our next Mini-Session , a continuation of our Next Up event staged at the Chicago Architecture Biennial . While Roberts' interview at the Chicago Cultural Center unfortunately didn't make it to tape, I called her up for a do-over interview in Rome, where she is currently residing as a winner of 2015-2016's Rome Prize . Roberts' contribution to the Biennial – a drill team performance entitled "We Know How to Order," staged in ...
Dec 02, 2015•18 min
For our final live Mini-Session , recorded during our Next Up event at the Chicago Architecture Biennial , we present a festival of Pauls. Archinect founder/publisher Paul Petrunia interviews Paul Andersen (Independent Architecture) and Paul Preissner (Paul Preissner Architects), who designed the University of Illinois at Chicago's kiosk in the Biennial's Lakefront Kiosk competition . You can listen to past Mini-Sessions here ....
Nov 25, 2015•13 min
Our latest installment of Mini-Sessions , recorded live at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 's opening weekend as part of our Next Up event series, features John Lin of Rural Urban Framework. This year's winner of the Curry Stone Design Prize , Rural Urban Framework has distinguished itself for work involving China's rapidly urbanizing rural landscapes. You can listen to past Mini-Sessions here ....
Nov 22, 2015•13 min
The Chicago Architecture Biennial is nearing the middle of its run, and we've got more live Mini-Sessions up our sleeve, recorded as part of our Next Up event held during the Biennial's opening weekend. You can listen to past Mini-Sessions here . Our fourth Mini-Session from Chicago features Biennial participants Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo and Mecky Reuss of Pedro y Juana, based in Mexico City. You can learn more about their contribution to the Biennial (which happened to be the venue for Next Up) h...
Nov 21, 2015•14 min
