Unfrozen

Today’s uncanny AI renderings are just the tip of theiceberg. Architects are banding together to clean up their digital houses, master data literacy, collectively bargain for their needs with software monopolies, and ultimately, prevent technology rendering them irrelevant. Enter the Innovation Design Consortium, an elite corps of leaders and technologists of America’s 40 largest architecturefirms, who have banded together to battle the bots. Unfrozen interviews its Chair, Peter Devereaux, Founding Principal of HED.Among many other things, he says, “We have to get out of the business of selling our time by the hour for the production of two-dimensional construction documents.”

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

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Discussed:

The Road to IDC: Writing guidelines for the use ofgenerative AI via the AIA Large Firm Roundtable (LFRT)

See also: “The Future of Generative AI in Architecture, Design and Engineering,” Cornell Tech

Key players:

-         Carole Wedge, Shepley Bulfinch

-         Bob Packard, ZGF

-         Brad Lukanic, Cannon Design

Other leading lights in the AI 4 AEC community:

Phillip Bernstein, Yale

Chris Minerva, Thornton Tomasetti

Greg Schluesner,

Volker Buscher,

Fish & Richardson

-         IP Law, terms and conditions, “give to get”

Is this the “anti-Autodesk”?

What does “after Autodesk” look like?

Salty Urbanism is a design manual to address sea level rise and climate change for urban areas in coastal zones. It is a concept that refers to the ways in which cities and urban areas will respond and adapt to rising sea levels and the accompanying increase in salinity of coastal and near-coastal land. This phenomenon is caused by a combination of factors, including global warming, sea-level rise, and human development along coastlines. Unfrozen interviews Jeffrey Huber, Principal, Brooks + Scarpa and Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Florida Atlantic University, about how the concept is applied in South Florida.

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

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Madeline Ashby is a freelance futurist and author of Glass Houses, a near-future sci-fi thriller about creepy tech, creepier tech bros, and the woman who dares challenge both. The first Unfrozen interview with a novelist takes us on a journey to desert islands, bland design-hotel furniture, evil architecture tropes, and much more.

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

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Show Notes:

- Previous work:

• - Company Town

• - The Machine Dynasty series

- Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program - OCAD University

- The Old Dark House, 1932

- Institute for the Future - Age of Networked Matter

- Haunted Objects, Greg and Dana Newkirk

- Major inspo: Michael Mann movies

• Heat

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

- David Cronenberg's Brutalist Toronto

- Toshiya Ueno and "Cultural Odorlessness"

- Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross collaboration on Halsey's 2021 album "If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power."

- The tendency of AI to generate from the baseline average of all things on the internet - usually porn, maybe hentai

- "Domestic Violence," Madeline Ashby, Slate, 2018

- Samantha Bee - "Excuse Me, Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Canada?"

- Network states

- Augmented Cities, Cornell Tech

- The decline of dating apps and replacement by AI bot boyfriends and girlfriends / The fracking of human consciousness

- DARVO

- Movie version would almost certainly star Kristen Bell or Kristen Stewart

Vishaan Chakrabarti is the founder and creative director of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), and the author of "The Architecture of Urbanity." He has worn many hats - in development, architecture, government and academia, and brings this experience to bear in his public advocacy work.

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

Show Notes:

- The "Joy" Thing with Tim Walz

- Obama > Biden Infrastructure Bill

- Is it really Rural vs Urban, or Suburban vs Everyone Else? Is it Rurbanity?

- UC Berkeley analysis of carbon footprints of cities vs rural vs suburban

- The mortgage interest tax deduction

- The Federal gas tax

- Out-migration from expensive to affordable cities - not the suburbs

- Railroad suburbs: Montclair and Maplewood NJ

- Carbon pricing

- Jane Jacobs' idea that cities formed around trade

- James C. Scott

- The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow

- Alternate civilizational origin stories at the Venice Biennale

- The places we go on vacation all have lousy parking

- The energy source powering cars is not really the issue - it's the degree to which we design our cities around cars - or not

- Copenhagen - the urban planning Mecca - but where are the immigrants?

- InterOculus, PAU, Columbus, Indiana

- "Because they've been told their definition of excellence is to design spaceships to be built by slaves in the sand, that's what architects are off doing. And so of course they're not at the adult table influencing policy. We can't relegate ourselves to the kiddie table by talking about irrelevant things and then complain about the chicken nuggets."

- "We don't help everyday people visualize the power of policy change as well as we could."

- "I think we are at a moment where it is really, important for people who understand the physical world to sit down and be able to speak the language of government."

- "Designing policy is a form of design."

- New York Times collaboration with PAU = NYC = Not Your Car

- Gov. Kathy Hochul's cancellation of congestion pricing

- Robert Caro, The Power Broker - "The city's permanent government" - the "deep state" might actually be OK

- "New York, New York, New York," by Tom Dyja

- Accepting imperfection as a necessary democratic outcome - instead of going Roark on imperfection and blowing it up

- Uber's hiring of Bradley Tusk, Bloomberg's third mayoral campaign manager

- Alejandro Aravena - an architect literally being the architect of the new Chilean constitution

- Norman Foster - adviser to the United Nations on rebuilding Ukraine

- Book design by Michael Beirut and Britt Cobb at Pentagram

Scott Francisco is the founder and director of Pilot Projects, a systems thinking and design consultancy that co-creates sustainable solutions to complex challenges in global systems, cities and the natural environment. On this episode of Unfrozen, we discuss the Cities4Forests initiative, which aims to more closely align the environmental and economic goals of cities and the forested lands on which they depend.

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Intro/Outro: "Elevator," by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

Wood @ Work, NYC, October 2015

Cities4Forests

Partner Forest Program

World Resources Institute

Mass Timber Tipping Point Report

Alliance of Francophone Mayors

Net zero

Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions

Nordic Structures

Montreal Protocol 1987

COP 15 Montreal, 2022

COP 21 Paris Agreement, 2015

COP 26 Glasgow, 2021

COP 28 Dubai, 2023

COP 30 Belem, Brazil:Design for activation: A Mass Timber, Conservation Timber Pavilion, Floating on the Amazon, with Hammocks!

Declaration for Forests and Cities

Alec Fitala, DOM, rainforest products > Hearts of Palmpasta

Tucked away in a hollow some 20 miles south of Atlanta, theTown of Trilith contains multitudes: possibly North America’s largest purpose-built film and television production studio, a steak/cigar bar, bucolic surrounds, “loft”-style living and cornhole games on an ersatz main street – everything, surely, somebody would want out of a hometown. But who? Kyle Holtan reports.

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Music: “Elevator,” by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

Congress for the New Urbanism

Serenbe, GA

Pinewood Atlanta Studios (now Trilith Studios)

Megalopolis

Dan Cathy & River’s Rock LLC
How The Chick-Fil-A Billionaire CEO Plays A Part In Your Favorite Marvel Movies

Trilithons

Georgia Guidestones

Mesa del Sol

The Buckhead Succession Movement

Stockbridge, GA vs Eagle’s Landing

Silvercup Studios

Kaufman Astoria Studios

Over the past 20 years, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani has taken the question, “what, and who is the city for?” directly to the streets of Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and Mosswood in Oakland, asking locals to take her to the places that matter to them. A visual urbanist, co-founder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada, and widely exhibited photographer, Bendiner-Viani holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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

Discussed:

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, NY

Mosswood, Oakland, CA

Prior urbanists of “placework”:

-         Jane Jacobs

-         David Harvey – The Right to the City

-         Henri Lefebvre – Le Droit à la Ville

-         Kevin Lynch – Image of the City

-         Christopher Alexander – A Pattern Language

-         Mindy Thompson Fullilove

Diana Lind – The Human Doom Loop

The Anti-Social Century, Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

Contested City, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Between, and sometimes within, the boundaries of nation-states are thousands of liminal zones which are neither here nor there, and their rules are different from those of the countries in which they are physically located. Author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian calls this “The Hidden Globe,” and chronicles the in-between places where money, art, luxurygoods, and stateless prisoners spend time in limbo. At a time of rising nationalism, tariff wars, and mass deportations, these places are on the ascendant. What are they like? Why are they there? And what’s next? Join this episode ofUnfrozen to find out.

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

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Discussed:

-         The Geneva Freeport

-         Svalbard

-         Tenet

-         The Cosmopolites

-         Henley & Partners

-         Dubai International Finance Center (DIFC)

-         Mark Beer, Zone Man

-         Estonia e-residency program

-         Greenland, Guantanamo Bay, and the Panama Canalare also zones

-         Freedom Cities

-         Boten, Laos

-         Laos-China Railway

-         Golden Triangle Zone

-         The Mont Pelerin Society

-         Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling

-         Paul Collier

-         Paul Romer and the Charter City

-         Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

-         Hudson Yards

-         Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

-         U.S. Rep Jake Auchinsloss (D – MA) infavor of charter cities

-         Citizenship by investment = passports for sale:here to stay

-         Praxis: “The startup nation we deserve today”

Amidst the unprecedented destruction wrought by the multiple fires that swept across Southern California in January 2025, there are opportunities, and causes for optimism that we can build back, better than before. Among these is the prospective role of prefabricated construction,

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

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Discussed:

Bloomberg CityLab: Los Angeles Fire Victims Turn to Prefab Homes for Quick Builds

Regulations:

Woolsey fire, 2018

Architecturally significant buildings (at least 32) lost in the fires

The inauguration of the 47th president of the United States takes place on January 20. What are the implications of Trump 2.0 on the built environment, design and cities? Inspired by the eponymous, omnibus crucible of dread in the New York Review of Architecture, we huddled with the best and brightest design critics we know, Kate Wagner (The Nation / McMansion Hell) and Zach Mortice (Bloomberg CityLab) to try to come to grips with the oncoming MAGAlopolis.

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

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Discussed:

Will They Build the Wall and its Ancillaries?

Trump Will Not Make Architecture Great Again

Make Tartaria Great Again

Journalists needed, maybe more than architects right now

The Harold Washington Library is not a relic of an advanced

Will there be a Super State Fair?

Trump administration aesthetic = BioShock Infinite

Will the FBI Edgar J. Hoover Building (C.F. Murphy, 1975) be moved or demolished?

The Trads Have It

Tommy Tuberville: California will get Federal aid if “conditions

Scott

Jason Tester: Insurrection

Post-fire price gouging in L.A.

Suspending environmental regulations in California to build the same thing over again

It’s housing affordability, stupid – look at Canada

What happened to the rent cap?

We’re a few election cycles away from “progressive” mayors

“The future is about old people, in big cities, afraid of

Hoovervilles > Trumptowns

DOGE = Department of Graft Enhancement