Unfrozen

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: Downtowns

Karen Seto

Kevin Kelley, a self-described “attention architect,” is a

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Intro/Outro: “Friction,” by Television

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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

Craig Hutson has worked in research and development in academia and industry and is fascinated with the history of Chicago’s lakefront. When seeking a definitive book about the history of Illinois Center and Lakeshore East, the air-rights developments above former docklands and railyards east of the Loop, he realized there wasn’t one, and he decided to write it himself.

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Intro/Outro: “Nighttime in the Switching Yard,” by Warren

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Discussed:

Illinois Central Railroad

Illinois Center

Lakeshore East

Millennium Park

Maggie Daley Park

Aqua

St. Regis Chicago

Outer Drive East (400 East Randolph)

Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower

The Park at Lakeshore East

Millennium Station

Hyatt Regency Chicago

Chicago Pedway

Boulevard East

Magellan Development Group

James Loewenberg

Intro/Outro: “Nighttime in the Switching Yard,” by Warren Zevon

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Discussed:

Illinois Central Railroad

Illinois Center

Lakeshore East

Millennium Park

Maggie Daley Park

Aqua

St. Regis Chicago

Outer Drive East (400 East Randolph)

Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower

The Park at Lakeshore East

Millennium Station

Hyatt Regency Chicago

Chicago Pedway

Boulevard East

Frank Lowenberg

Magellan Development

Intro/Outro: “Scare Me,” by Deadbolt

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Discussed:

Immanuel Kant

Edmund Burke

Harvard Graduate School of Design under Rem Koolhaas

Bigness, or the Problem of Large, by Rem Koolhaas

Centre Pompidou = Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

Xintiandi, Shanghai

Jan Gehl

The Architectural Uncanny, by Anthony Vidler

Built Beautiful, with narration by … Martha Stewart

Mullets

Army of Darkness

Twins are in

Doppelgangers

Ordos 100, Inner Mongolia

• House House, by Johnston Marklee
• Gaston Bachelard
• Preston Scott Cohen
• Ai Weiwei

H.R. Giger -> Zaha Hadid -> Thomas Heatherwick-> Santiago Calatrava

Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town

Gordon Matta-Clark

Jan Kaplicky / Future Systems

Frank Gehry

Francois Roche

Parc de la Villette

American Psycho

Hannover Pavilion at Expo 2000 by MVRDV = Arby’s Breakfast Sandwich

Toshiko Mori

Caltrans Building, Los Angeles, Morphosis

Daniel Libeskind

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, by Alan Moore

House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Saddam Hussein’s Frank Frazetta-esque fantasy interior paintings

Idi Amin’s Chinese Garden

Great Basilica, Yamoussukro, Ivory Coast (110% the size of St. Peters)

Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The Day of the Beast and Philip Johnson’s Gate of Europe, Madrid

Intro/Outro: “Miss You,” by the Rolling Stones

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Discussed:

• Spotify throws a sprocket in our jam-bulance wheels
• Ubik-like terms of service, as written by Philip K. Dick.
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Dubai: Mistakes were made
• 15-minute cities are in the Dubai 2040 plan
• Junkspace
• Diriyah Gate
• Qiddiya
• North Pole Riyadh, 2-kilometer tower by Foster + Partners
• The Ministry of McKinsey
• The US Senate Inquiry into the PIF Consultants
• Dubai Creek Harbour and the delayed Dubai Creek Tower maybe restarting?
• Jeddah Tower also maybe restarting?
• Pritzker Prize goes to Riken Yamamoto
  • Work includes The Circle, Zurich Airport
• Bjarke Ingels had a big, postmodern, postironic week
  • Museum/Casino of Freedom and Democracy, New York
  • Las Vegas A’s Stadium
• Exhuming Baudrillard
• Bears and Sox lobbying Chicago and Illinois for stadium subsidies
• F1 < Saudi Vegas > F1
• Saudi 2034 World Cup Stadium by Populous
• Greg’s SXSW calendar
  • Conference of Mayors Civic I/O Mayor’s Summit
  • Using Augmented Reality to Drive Inclusive City Development
• Also at SXSW: Imagine Harder: Prototyping Impossible Futures
• Don’t drive or walk outside using Apple Vision Pro goggles
• Upcoming guests:
  • Joshua Comaroff & Ong Ker-Shing, authors of Horror in Architecture
  • Kevin Kelley, Shook Kelley, author of Irreplaceable (not Kevin Kelly)

Never mind the weather, don’t you feel it has been a cold

Intro/Outro: “Miss You,” by the Rolling Stones

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Discussed:

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o   Museum/Casino of Freedom and Democracy, New York

o   Las Vegas A’s Stadium

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o  Conference of Mayors

o  Using Augmented Reality to Drive Inclusive City Development

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o  Joshua Comaroff & Ong Ker-Shing, authors of Horror in Architecture

o  Kevin Kelley, Shook Kelley, author of Irreplaceable (not Kevin Kelly)

Intro/Outro: “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx

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Discussed:

• ZHA’s Patrik Schumacher keynote at the AIA Center for Architecture’s AI+A Symposium, 16 December 2023 
• Dall-E, ChatGPT, Midjourney, OpenAI
• HOU 3000: Serpentine Galleries’ virtual chief curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist
• TT’s Spark Intranet
• Cornell Tech Jacobs Institute: The Future of Generative AI in Architecture, Design and Engineering
• TT made a digital twin of welding and metallurgy expert Mike DeLashmit. The real Mike gives Mike 2.0 a “4.7 out of 5” in terms of the accuracy of its answers.
• Converting scanned PDF drawings with annotations into vectors + tabular data
• Google Gemini
• A “hallucination throttle” for generative AI iterations on existing documents
• Using AI to optimize material quantities, operational energy, and eventually, embodied carbon

In every office, there is someone with so much accumulated knowledge the boss wants to “clone” them. At structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti (TT), they’ve basically done that. The firm has taken the concept of a “digital twin” to a newly literal level – engineers can now quiz a synthetic clone of the firm’s in-house welding and metallurgy expert, constructed from 30

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Intro/Outro: “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx

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Discussed:

·     ZHA’s Patrik Schumacher keynote at the AIA

·     Dall-E, ChatGPT, Midjourney, OpenAI

·     HOU 3000: Serpentine Galleries’ virtual

·     TT’s Spark Intranet

·     Cornell Tech Jacobs Institute: The

·     TT made a digital twin of welding and metallurgy expert Mike DeLashmit. The real Mike gives "Mike 2.0" a “4.7 out of 5” in terms of the accuracy of its answers.

·     Converting scanned PDF drawings with annotations into vectors + tabular data

·     Google Gemini

·     A “hallucination throttle” for generative AI

·     Using AI to optimize material quantities,

Mankind’s quest for verticality has an underexplored dimension:

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

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Discussed: