Unfrozen

Cities that produce only underwear, blue jeans and extras in domestic films are among the fascinating objects of study in Typological Drift: Emerging Cities in China by Shiqiao Li and Esther Lorenz. Journey with Unfrozen and Shiqiao Li to reveal the surprising urban realities of China that escape normative urban theories, with several stops along the way in philosophy and linguistics.

Typological Drift: Emerging Cities in China by Shiqiao Li and Esther Lorenz

Interviewee: Shiqiao Li is Weedon Professor in Asian Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Virginia, where he teaches history, theory, and design of architecture, and directs PhD in the Constructed Environment Program. He is author of Understanding the Chinese City (2014), Architecture and Modernization (2009, in Chinese) and Power and Virtue, Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1650-1730 (2006). He recently contributed an essay to the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture (2022).

Inro/Outro: “Drifted” by Groove Armada

Discussed:

Drift Triggers

Ten Thousand Things

Yiwu International Trade City

Borges: “The map of the empire is the size of the empire itself.”

Figuration

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Francois Jullien: The Silent Transformations

Nanhui New City

Hengdian World Studios

Minmetals Hallstatt

Thames Town

Lujiazui

The Bund

Tongji Architectural Design Group Co. Ltd.

Michael Eliason is an architect and founder of Larch Lab, a studio focused on prefabricated, decarbonized, climate-adaptive, low-energy buildings and livable ecodistricts. Eliason, based in Seattle, had a transformative experience while living in Germany – the American residential model could be greatly improved by adopting some of the principles of Baugruppen – self-developed co-housing, without the granola trappings. Hear the Unfrozen interview – and then listen to his podcast, Livable Low-Carbon City.

Intro/Outro: “Spacelab” by Kraftwerk

Discussed:

Hanif Kara is a civil and structural engineer and professor in practice at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the co-founder of AKT II, a 350-person engineering practice based in London. The firm won the Stirling Award for Peckham Library in 2000 (with (Will Alsop), the Sainsbury Laboratory in 2012 (with Stanton Williams), and the Bloomberg European Headquarters in 2018 (with Foster + Partners). He is co-author of Blank: Speculations on CLT with Jennifer Bonner, and the recipient of the 2022 Fazlar Khan Lifetime Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Intro/Outro: Great Things, by Echobelly

Discussed:

One Park Drive (with Herzog & De Meuron)

Castilla (with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners)

240 Blackfriars (with AHMM)

The Tower and the Bridge by David P. Billington

Joint studio with Farshid Moussavi, using reclaimed steel

Google HQ London (with BIG & Heatherwick Studio)

The Francis Crick Institute (with HOK & PLP Architecture)

Culture flaps at SCI-Arc and The Bartlett

Hanif Kara is a civil and structural engineer and professor in practice at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the co-founder of AKT II, a 350-person engineering practice based in London. The firm won the Stirling Award for Peckham Library in 2000 (with (Will Alsop), the Sainsbury Laboratory in 2012 (with Stanton Williams), and the Bloomberg European Headquarters in 2018 (with Foster + Partners). He is co-author of Blank: Speculations on CLT with Jennifer Bonner, and the recipient of the 2022 Fazlar Khan Lifetime Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Intro/Outro: Great Things, by Echobelly

Discussed:

One Park Drive (with Herzog & De Meuron)

Castilla (with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners)

240 Blackfriars (with AHMM)

The Tower and the Bridge by David P. Billington

Joint studio with Farshid Moussavi, using reclaimed steel

Google HQ London (with BIG & Heatherwick Studio)

The Francis Crick Institute (with HOK & PLP Architecture)

Culture flaps at SCI-Arc and The Bartlett

Unfrozen interviews Peter Wynne Rees, Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, who was previously City Planning Officer for the City of  London, from 1985 to 2014. He is a founding member and director  (1990-2022) of the British Council for Offices and received their  President’s Award in 2003 for “presiding over one of the most extensive  periods of redevelopment in the City’s long history”. This is his first appearance on the program, but he has been the subject of two prior episodes, #21, This is London: Rees Remembrances and #22, The Engine Room, the City, and Color Commentary.

Intro/Outro: "The City Is Here for You to Use," by The Futureheads

Discussed:

CTBUH Lynn Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award

Shoreditch

20 Fenchurch Street

Metropolis

Canary Wharf

Favelas

The East End

The cult of home ownership, enforced by government

The Elizabeth Line

HS2

Lifespan of buildings vs building products

What architecture and planning students should be learning

Patrick MacLeamy was the CEO of HOK from 2003 to 2017, capping off a 50-year career at the venerable firm responsible for the National Air and Space Museum, Moscone Center, and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and is credited with creating "The MacLeamy Curve," a touchstone of business guidance for the built environment. In his semi-retirement, he is a founder and chairman of buildingSMART International, which encourages the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and more open collaboration between the design and construction industries. He recently authored "Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories and Strategies Behind HOK." Hear some of his lifetime's worth of colorful anecdotes and sage advice on this special episode of Unfrozen.

Intro/Outro: "Elevation" by U2

Nuggets:

“We need to think about contractors as our valued colleagues and friends, and change the way we think about our industry. It needs to be more collaborative – design-bid-build is going into the dustbin of history. Collaborative design-build is the way forward.”

“Managing risk and complexity is much easier to do collaboratively. We have to wake up and smell the coffee. The old way of designing and building is changing. If architects want to rejoin society in a special place, they have to adapt. The world needs us, but we need to get the rules of the game changed so we can be successful again.”

Daniel Kaven is the author of Architecture of Normal: The Colonization of the American Landscape, a book that views the built environment through the lens of successive developments in transportation. An architect and visual artist hailing from Albuquerque, now calling Portland home, Kaven takes on suburbanization, flying cars, and why “Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”

Intro/Outro: The Big Country, by The Talking Heads

Discussed:

Ed Ruscha

Cibola – one of the Seven Cities of Gold

COVID as accelerant of moving from an experiential lifestyle to a destination-based lifestyle

Instagram feeds are the new main streets of America

United Airlines buys Archer – an air-taxi company

Henry Ford’s flying personal cars department

Prediction: First place to adopt flying cars – Saudi Arabia

The Main Street and Mall Retail Apocalypse

Future infrastructure and traffic planning will be about stratification of means of transport, literally

Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn’t mean we should

Do we want to live in places where we just order online and it gets delivered to a drone pad?

The Big Tech companies are nation-states, or partners thereof

Urbanism had a good run from 1990s to just before COVID.

The post-COVID boom is in places like suburban Boise – Boomtown ZoomTown, and it’s already fizzling.

“Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”

Architecture firms have really phoned in their responsibility to make places where people want to be – as a counterpoint to work-from-home, the tone of which is being set by Facebook and their brethren.

“There is no future with goggles on.”

“We don’t need to rip America apart and build the Metaverse.”

“How can people live a more spacious life in an urban environment?”

“We’re going to regret having made all these 5-over-1 wood-frame buildings with cheap materials.”

Intro/Outro: The Night Chicago Died, by Paper Lace

Postmodernism – is it still alive and well?

Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

1980 Venice Architecture Biennale

Change in Chicago really began with opening of Millennium Park in 2004

Ideas are convergent rather than divergent these days…

Mayoral/Architectural Era Overlay:

Daley 1: Mies van der Rohe and Modernism

Daley 2: Millennium Park

Emmanuel: Riverwalk and boathouses

Big Tech Moves In: Google buys the Thompson Center – will it become more public?

Comparable to Pompidou Center or Lloyd’s of London as a kind of “Hi-Tech” building.

The criticism of Thompson Center’s poor conditioning has clouded Jahn’s other achievements, including the United Terminal at O’Hare and the Citicorp Center (now Accenture Tower)/Ogilvie Transportation Center.

State Street Village at Illinois Institute of Technology

Harold Washington Library – the last great Postmodern building in Chicago, looks like an “open book,” but once you’re inside…

The Chicago Cultural Center

The 1990s were a dead zone of malaise for architecture. The Museum of Contemporary Art by Josef Paul Kleihues gently nudged it out of that slumber. And then, Bilbao Guggenheim blared the klaxon.

The Chicago Seven

Stanley Tigerman – Library for the Blind, 1978

University of Chicago Campus

            Booth School of Business – Rafael Vinoly

Logan Center – Tod Williams Billie Tsien

Rubenstein Forum – Diller Scofidio + Renfro

            Obama Presidential Center – Tod Williams Billie Tsien

“There is more architectural diversity in a typical residential Chicago block than in all five boroughs of New York City.” – Vladimir Belogolovsky

Landon Bone Baker – socially conscious affordable housing projects

Respect for context did get a revival boost from PoMo.

Stewart Cohen – Contextualism

Is there a Chicago School of Architecture today? If there is, it is defined by respect for materials, and pushing boundaries to make buildings work well.

Dan’s recent consecration of the world’s tallest timber building; Greg’s new gigs, and hotels to stay at while making them happen; the third space in a post-COVID world; update on the Durbin Renewal scandal in Chicago, and a preview of upcoming guests.

Intro/Outro: Super Sex by Morphine

Tall Timber:

Ascent, Milwaukee

Rocket & Tigerli, Winterthur, Switzerland

Atlassian Central, Sydney

Greg’s gig in NYC this week:

Patcraft– Shaw Industries, with:

Brad Hargraeves – Common

Evan Fain – Industrious

Boutique Hotels:

The Freehand N.Y.C.

The Standard L.A.

The Standard High Line N.Y.C.

The Ace Brooklyn

The Ace Portland – have a record player!

Why not the Nakagin Capsule Hotel?

Brooklyn Mirage(Bushwick / Ridgewood)

Brimfield Antique Flea Market – feeding ground for Roman & Williams-designed boutique hotels

Inside Amy Schumer Pretentious Hotel

McKinsey & Co NYC Taskforce to repurpose office space

Mary Ludgin, Heitman, Chicago taskforce

Durbin Renewal: Century and Consumers buildings

Greg’s new gigs

- Undisclosed fellowship, a.k.a. Pokemon NO!: Preparing cities for the metaverse, protecting real public space from virtual reality, unregulated disruptors, and more…

- Parag Khanna startup: Chief Communications Officer: Tool for modeling climate risk. Invest now in the climate-resilient regions of the world. The call is open for volunteers.

Are we living in Ready Player One or Snow Crash?

Marina Otero, head of the Social Design Masters Program at Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's 2022 Wheelwright Prize. Her study, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, will examine new architecture paradigms for storing data, and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

Intro:

Lithium, by Nirvana

Discussed:

The Stack, Benjamin Bratton

Ingrid Burrington

Tubes, Andrew Blum

Grow Your Own Cloud

DNA as a storage medium

Seed banks for data

A data garden in Eindhoven

Destinations:

- Singapore: Had a ban on data centers for a number of years; are seaborne and underwater data centers an option? Floating solar farms?

- Darwin, Australia: Data governance – the first indigenous-led data center. Who has access to the data? Who owns it?

- Nigeria: Woman-led crypto-tech communities. Positioning themselves against the corporations that are bringing the infrastructure, so they can set up their own.

- Chile: Lithium extraction, new Humboldt Cable to New Zealand and Australia.

- Iceland and Sweden: Questions connected to industry and energy. Use of new infrastructures. In Sweden, one data center is also a club.

- California: Where new storage media are being developed.

Outro:

A Forest, by The Cure