The Aesthetic City

Professor Michael Lykoudis is an experienced architect, educator and consultant. He is a professor at the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, where he served as its first dean from 2004 until 2020.

In this episode, we talk about traditional & classical architecture education, about the origin of the Driehaus prize, building materials, problems with modern ways of building and much more.

Visit Prof. Lykoudis' website here: https://www.mlykoudisarchitect.com/

University of Notre Dame School of Architecture: https://architecture.nd.edu/

The Richard H Driehaus Prize: https://architecture.nd.edu/news-events/events/driehaus-prize/

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For more information on The Aesthetic City, find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

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Nicholas Boys Smith is founder of CreateStreets, an organisation that exists to help solve the housing crisis and that aims to help actors such as developers, landowners, councils and neighbourhoods to create more beautiful, sustainable places. The places that CreateStreets envisions are of gentle density, popular, and with high probability correlated with good wellbeing and public health outcomes. With a great body of research, CreateStreets can make a strong case for the benefits of these places and has actually achieved considerable impact in the UK.

Learn more on their website: https://www.createstreets.com/

Buy 'Heart in the Right Street' on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Right-Street-happiness-designing/dp/0993569811/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UYKL6E5VJ930&keywords=heart+in+the+right+street&qid=1662816298&sprefix=heart+in+the+right+street%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-1

View 'What Makes for Happy Places' on YouTube: https://youtu.be/B1k5HLb-aqQ 

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For more information on The Aesthetic City, find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city?fan_landing=true

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Professor Robert Adam has over 40 years of experience as an architect, specialised in Classical architecture. In 1992 he founded ADAM Architecture, having been a partner at an architectural firm since 1977. He authored numerous publications including the well known 'Classical Architecture, A Complete Handbook' and was the founder of INTBAU, the International Network of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Senior Fellow of the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment and a visiting professor of urban design at the University of Strathclyde. In 2017, he won the prestigious Driehaus Prize, for “the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture in contemporary society”.

In this episode we discussed various topics, from myths surrounding modernity, the value of beauty in our built environment to the importance of identity. 

He recently launched his new book, Time for Architecture, which is available here: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-4597-7

Visit his website: https://www.robertadamarchitect.com/

Find a list of his publications here: https://www.robertadamarchitect.com/about#PUBLICATIONS

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For more information about this platform and podcast on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city?fan_landing=true

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Sarah Bannister is a promising urban planner from Bath, studying for her masters at the Bartlett School of Planning in London. She has a diverse range of experience, from working for the Swindon Borough Council to working for CreateStreets and the Bath preservation trust. Currently she works for Meristem Design, a company that aims to make our cities more liveable and healthy through urban greenery.

Sarah's website can be found on https://sarahbannister.co.uk/

She wrote an excellent article on Medium about the lost buildings of Bath: https://sbannister234.medium.com/the-lost-buildings-of-bath-f7306b11baed

Connect with her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scb_planning

Learn more about Meristem Design: https://www.meristemdesign.co.uk/

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For more information on The Aesthetic City,

find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city?fan_landing=true

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Coby Lefkowitz is an urbanist, developer and writer living in New York City. He was a real estate analyst, but left his company to co-found Backyard, a real estate startup. He studied urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia and writes for the Metropolis column for Medium.

In this second interview with Coby we discuss the topic of highrise in various contexts, NIMBYism and densification, organic growth of cities as complex systems versus planned developments, the value of building beauty and the involvement of communities in building places they love, and much more.

Find Coby on Medium: https://cobylefko.medium.com/

Follow Coby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cobylefko

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For more information on The Aesthetic City,

find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city?fan_landing=true

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Michael Spicher is a writer and philosopher, who is specialised in art and aesthetics. He is based in Boston and earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina. He currently teaches at Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Boston Architectural College. Apart from that he also founded the Aesthetics Research Lab in 2016, with an excellent website that showcases a lot of fascinating research and projects that showcase the importance of aesthetics in our everyday lives. He is currently co-editing a book about digital fashion for Bloomsbury Publishing. This episode dives deep into the questions of what aesthetics are, why they are important, the difference between beauty and taste and the great value of what can be achieved when various fields of research are combined.

Visit Michael's website here: Aesthetics Research Lab

Social Media: Twitter  |  LinkedIn  | PhilPeople

Michael is the Aesthetics Area Editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Books

In this episode, Michael talks about the following books:

The survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff

The Abuse of Beauty, Arthur C. Danto

Beauty: A Quick Immersion, Crispin Sartwell

The Aesthetic Brain, Anjan Chatterjee

Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr

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For more information on The Aesthetic City, find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Building Culture creates wonderful structural brick masonry, something not common in current construction practice (to put it very mildly). Their work is beautiful, of excellent quality and above all, authentic. This authenticity sparks a passion and lingering desire for beauty in many who see their work. Starting Building Culture has been a life changing experience for its founder Austin Tunnell, who is as passionate as it gets about building. Listen to his inspiring story in this episode!

Find the website here: https://www.buildingculture.com/

Follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingculture/

Follow them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Build_Culture

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For more information on The Aesthetic City, find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Samuel Hughes is a research fellow at Oxford University and senior fellow at Policy Exchange and Create Streets. He has a background in philosophy, as he completed his PhD in Philosophy in 2020 in Cambridge. He spent time as a visiting researcher at many other universities and served as research assistant to the British governments’ Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

In this episode, we talk about a variety of topics: we hear about Samuel's work with the Building Better, Building Beautiful committee for the UK government, about how 'beauty' is being spoken about again and how it is more important than we think, how to intensify urban areas and much more.

Samuel Hughes on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SCP_Hughes

Find more information on the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission and its work here: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-building-beautiful-commission

Strong Suburbs paper with the street votes principle:

https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/strong-suburbs/

CreateStreets' website: https://www.createstreets.com/

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For more information on The Aesthetic City,

find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/

Ben Southwood has worked for KPMG, was head of research at the Adam Smith Institute and the head of Housing, Transport and Urban Space at the UK think tank ‘Policy Exchange’.

He has also assisted CreateStreets as head of research. Currently he is editor at Stripe, for the online journal Works in Progress. An excellent source for high quality, optimistic articles on scientific progress, innovation and other topics.

In this episode he talks about the StreetVotes concept, how it can gently transition low density areas into beautiful, denser neighbourhoods, offering more housing units in overheated markets, giving more power to local communities and enabling them to reap the benefits of this  densification. The concept is a true win-win solution that is now being tested out in the UK on a small scale.

Visit Works in Progress here: https://www.worksinprogress.co/

Find the StreetVotes concept and whitepaper here: https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/strong-suburbs/

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For more information on The Aesthetic City,

find our website on https://theaestheticcity.com/

Love what we do? Become a patron! With your help we can grow this platform even further, make more content and hopefully achieve real, lasting impact for more beautiful cities worldwide.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/the_aesthetic_city

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_Aesthetic_City

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.aesthetic.city/