Unfrozen

A quick one before we’re away. Dan and Greg sum up theirsprings and get ready for spritzes and socializing with smart people in at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

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Intro/Outro: “Bounder of Adventure,” by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

Going Underground -> The Space Below w/ James Parakh

·        Toronto PATH

·        Montreal RESO

·        Chicago Pedway

·        Minneapolis Skyway

·        Houston Tunnels

·        Oklahoma City Underground

·        Hong Kong Central Elevated Walkway

Zohran Mamdami –Make the Subway Great Again

Smart City Expo, New York City

Business Facilities Live eXchange, New Orleans

Curbivore, Los Angeles

Jonah Bliss

Joshua Harris, Fordham University

Marchetti’s constant

Zipline

Austin Baker Tilly Conference

CosMc’s

National Association of Realtors survey

Waymo

RoboCop

Sidewalk Toronto

Downstate IL secession movement

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson, feat. Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong

Paul Romer

Charter Cities

The Voluntary City - David T. Beto, Peter Gordon and Alexander Tabarrok

How to Run the World - Parag Khanna

Hell on Earth – The 30 Years’ War Podcast

The Network State - Balaji Srinivasan

Global Parliament of Mayors / Ben Barber

Polarization of reality > revenge of sovereignty

Praxis: Med Charter City > Greenland feat. Steven Harper

The evermore-relevant Hidden Globe episode

Exit, Voice and Loyalty - Albert O. Hirschman

Patri Friedman

The lost art of imagining the future

“My Brain Finally Broke,” - Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker

Bruce Sterling – Atemporality

Sara Bronin is an architect, attorney, policymaker, and professor at Cornell University. Born and raised in Houston, the only large US city without zoning, previously served as the Chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission of Hartford, Connecticut. Her book is called Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and she joins Unfrozen to demystify the why and wherefore of what you can, cannot, and “must” build in cities all over the US.

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Intro/Outro: “Elevator,” by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

-         How large-lot mandates contribute to the epidemic of loneliness

-         YIMBY prevails in Arlington and Alexandria, VA

-         Re-zoning in Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, OR, and Hartford

-         Supreme Court ruling on Shelley vs Kraemer, 1948, outlawing racially restrictive covenants

-         Houston’s affordability comes at the cost of flood zones and unpleasant adjacencies

-         Gulfton neighborhood

-         El Principe Azul nightclub

-         Effects of Parking Provision on Automobile Use in Cities: Inferring Causality

-         Albany Avenue rezoning and corridor improvements, Hartford

-         Denise Best

-         Form-based code

-         Washington Commanders’ new DC stadium

-         Code overhauls in Hartford, Charlottesville VA, and Boston

-         Bronin trashes Boston’s zoning code

-         Pittsburgh spends $5.8 million on zoning consultant

Sara Bronin is an architect, attorney, policymaker, and professor at Cornell University. Born and raised in Houston, the only large US city without zoning, previously served as the Chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission of Hartford, Connecticut. Her book is called Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and she joins Unfrozen to demystify the why and wherefore of what you can, cannot, and “must” build in cities all over the US.

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Intro/Outro: “Elevator,” by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

-         How large-lot mandates contribute to the epidemic of loneliness

-         YIMBY prevails in Arlington and Alexandria, VA

-         Re-zoning in Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, OR, and Hartford

-         Supreme Court ruling on Shelley vs Kraemer, 1948, outlawing racially restrictive covenants

-         Houston’s affordability comes at the cost of flood zones and unpleasant adjacencies

-         Gulfton neighborhood

-         El Principe Azul nightclub

-         Effects of Parking Provision on Automobile Use in Cities: Inferring Causality

-         Albany Avenue rezoning and corridor improvements, Hartford

-         Denise Best

-         Form-based code

-         Washington Commanders’ new DC stadium

-         Code overhauls in Hartford, Charlottesville VA, and Boston

-         Bronin trashes Boston’s zoning code

-         Pittsburgh spends $5.8 million on zoning consultant

Kevin Kelley, a self-described “attention architect,” is aco-founding partner of design firm Shook Kelley and author of Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together. In our digitized world of ghost commerce, he believes there is still a place for real places, and that it is incumbent on architects to stop looking down their nosesat retail, the essential lubricant of urban life, and start designing places that matter.

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Intro/Outro: “24 Hour Limes" by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

Bass Pro Shops at the Memphis Pyramid

Against 15-Minute Delivery

“The Bonfire Effect,” courtesy Loxahatchie, Florida

Participation mystique, as per Jung, as per Lucien Levy-Bruhl

“TheAnxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt

“Harvard Guide to Shopping” by Rem Koolhaas et. al.

Prior Unfrozen commentary on the replacement for the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph

Robert Venturi on Las Vegas

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Yaromir Steiner and Easton Town Center, Columbus

Victor Gruen

Country Club Plaza, Kansas City

The Grove, Los Angeles

The Farmer’s Market, Los Angeles

Larchmont, Los Angeles

Hollywood and Highland (now Ovation), Los Angeles

Harley-Davidson dealerships’ Parts Bar

Mercado Gonzalez, Costa Mesa, CA

Jason Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University Newark and one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers. His new book, out May 14, 2024, is Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers. In it, Barr takes a global view of why the quest to build up is as fierce as ever, and why skyscrapers remain so controversial. Join the Unfrozen interview with Barr, in which some record-breaking myths get busted.

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Intro/Outro: “Altitude Blues,” by Ladytron

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Discussed:

Mythbusting the Home Insurance Building

First Skyscrapers | Skyscraper Firsts Forum

LeRoy Buffington’s skyscraper patent

Mythbusting The Skyscraper Index

The Line

Jeddah Tower

Joel Garreau’s Edge City

Emaar’s real estate play at Burj Khalifa: Downtown Dubai

Legends Tower, Oklahoma City

Empire State Building

China’s “build it” economy

“Zero Gravity Living”

Nashville and Oracle

Detroit and Dan Gilbert

Newark renaissance

Center City District (Philadelphia) study: DowntownsRebound

Karen Seto(Yale)'s studies on tall building height canopies

In To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century, Richard Weller, Professor Emeritus and Co-Founder of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania, has condensed a sprawling subject into a compact field guide to 120 of the most significant 21st century objects, from bulldozers to Biosphere II. Call it dystopian, call it optimistic. Just don’t call it “anthroporn.”

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Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform," by The Cooper Vane

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Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, by Timothy Morton

Utopias (and Utopia’s Evil Twins)

                  Welwyn Garden City

                  Chandigarh

                  Burning Man

                  EPCOT

                  Pruitt-Igoe

                  WalmartSupercenter

Machines:

Bulldozers + polymetric nodules

Fish farms

Solar arrays

Sand motor + littoral drift

Tree-planting drones

Monsters:

                  Geo-engineering

The World Park Project / UN Convention on Biological Diversity

Y2Y

Banff Wildlife Crossings Project

The Atlas for the End of the World

Chris Hytha and Mark Houser are collaborators on Highrises: Art Deco, a multimedia series chronicling the great skyscraper edifices of the roaring ‘20s. Photographed by drones and meticulously measured and researched, the series – a book, prints, website, mobile phone wallpaper and exhibition -- reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons. Catch the in-person book talk on July 18 and the exhibition from May 31 to August 26 at the Chicago Architecture Center.

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Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform," by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

MultiStories: 55 Antique Skyscrapers and the Business Tycoons Who Built Them

The DJI Air 2S Drone

Highrises Art Deco: 100 Spectacular Skyscrapers from the Roaring ‘20s to the Great Depression

Henry W. Oliver Building, Pittsburgh, D.H. Burnham, 1910

Nebraska State Capitol, Lincoln, Bertram Goodhue, 1932

Public Market > Modern Spirits Liquor Store, Tulsa, Gaylord Noftsger, 1930

Monadnock Building, Chicago, Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche, 1891-1893

Eastern Columbia Building, Los Angeles, Claud Beelman, 1930

Mather Tower > Club Quarters Hotel, Chicago, Herbert Riddle, 1928

Union & Peoples National Bank > Jackson County Tower, Jackson, MI, Albert Kahn, 1929

Frick Building, Pittsburgh, D.H. Burnham, 1902

The Woolworth Building, New York, Cass Gilbert, 1913

Price Tower, Bartlesville, OK, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1956

Sterick Building, Memphis, Wyatt C Hendrick & Co, 1930

Industrial Trust Building, Providence, George Frederick Hall, Walker & Gillette, 1927

Guardian Building, Detroit, Donaldson & Meier; Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, 1929

Fisher Building, Detroit, Albert Kahn Associates; Graven & Mayger, 1928

Carbide & Carbon Building, Chicago, Burnham Brothers, 1929

Foshay Tower, Minneapolis, Hooper & Janusch; Magney & Tusler, 1929

Rand Tower, Minneapolis, Holabird & Root, 1929

Kansas City Power & Light Building, Kansas City, Hoit, Price & Barnes, 1931

“Either you’re growing your materials or not. You’re gettingthem from a forest or a mine.”

Lindsey Wikstrom is the Founding Principal of Mattaformaand an Adjunct Assistant Professor at ColumbiaGraduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her debut book, Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures, argues that to overcome obstacles to wide adoption of mass timber as a building material, we need to think differently about our relationship to trees, buildings, and each other.

Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform,” by The Cooper Vane

In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offersthe first in-depth architectural and urban history of London's financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. From the Big Tie to the Big Bang, it’s a heavy-hitting episode of Unfrozen.

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Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform," by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

-             Peter Wynne Rees

o  This is London: Rees Remembrances

o  The City is Here for You to Use

-             St Paul’s Cathedral

-             The Bank of England

-             The BigTie, by Brian Griffin

-             Broadgate

-             Top hatters

-             The Domesday Book

-             Corporation of London

-             Jamaica Wine House

-             The George and Vulture

-             Lloyds and the Lloyds Building

-             Eva Jiricna: Kenzo > Interiors at Lloyds

-             Spitting Image Richard Rogers episode

-             “Where Ideas Come From,” by Steven Johnson

-             Paul Romer’s “spillover effect”

-             The Big Bang, 1986

-             National Provincial Bank

-             If it’s bad in the City, it’s worse at Canary Wharf and Stamford

-             Bishopsgate bombing, 1993 & the Ring of Steel

-             The Barbican Estate

-             Paternoster Square & Prince Charles

-             London Wall

-             London County Council vs. the City of London Corporation

-             No. 1 Poultry, by James Stirling

-             One Exchange Square

-             Frank Duffy

-             “Edge of Empire,” by Jane Margaret Jacobs

-             The British financial archipelago, e.g., Bermuda and the Cayman Islands

“Every line on the road is a political choice.”

Marco te Brömmelstroet, a.k.a. “The Cycling Professor,” is the chair of Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam. His book Movement, with Thalia Verkade, takes a stance against myths and received wisdoms that surround popular thinking about the rights and place of cyclists and pedestrians, urban design, and traffic engineering. Parallel to the critique, he presents new ways of thinking about how, and why we move through the world, and at what speed.

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Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform," by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

-             Urban Cycling Institute

-             Woonerf

-             Chicane

-             Chip Cone

-             Cauliflower neighborhood, a.k.a. Bloemkoolwijk

-             Fighting Traffic, by Peter Norton

-             RoadDanger.org

-             Stafford Beer

-             Rollback of congestion pricing in New York City

-             The bicycle at the bed-in, Amsterdam 1969

-             The Royal Dutch Touring Club, AWNB vs the EWNB

-             School streets, Paris

-             Provo – Dutch nonviolent protest group + The White Bicycle Plan

-             Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig

-             Bicycle Highways

-             Anne Hidalgo + Carlos Moreno = 170,000 trees

-             Groningen car ban, 1980

-             Nieuwmarkt riots, Amsterdam, 1975

-             Janette Sadiq-Khan and the Times Square pedestrianization

-             Bike Bus – Sam Balto

-             NYC Municipal Vehicle Active Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) / Speed Geofencing

-             Valerie Plante, Mayor of Montreal, BIXI bikes (non-profitbike-sharing program)

-             Swapfliets (Swap Bike)