Unfrozen – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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

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
• Manhunter

- 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

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

Mankind’s quest for verticality has an underexplored dimension: the queasy feeling of vertigo many experience when close to the edge of a sheer drop. Davide Deriu, Reader in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Westminster, London, has taken on the relative lack of research into the subject with an interdisciplinary approach, captured in his book On Balance: Architecture and Vertigo. Come, stand on the edge with us.

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

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Discussed:

           Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

         Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, Stephen Graham, 2016

         Vertigo in the City program at University of Westminster, 2015

       The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 1979

         Funambulism

             Jean François "Blondin" Gravelet – Niagara Falls wire walk, 1859

       Philippe Petit, World Trade Center wire walk, 1974

             Jan Gehl on humans’ “natural” habitat in horizontal planes

           Singapore’s HDB social high-rises

            Mies’ insertion of ventilation grilles in front of the glass curtain wall at the Seagram Building, 1958

          Prosper Meniere, father of the vestibular sciences

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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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,
Executive Committee Secretary, IDC
Director of Design Technology, HOK

Volker Buscher,
Chief Data Officer, Data Leaders
Former Chief Data Officer, Arup

Fish & Richardson

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

Is this the “anti-Autodesk”?

What does “after Autodesk” look like?

“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)

Dan and Greg recap the highs and lows of the first full year of Unfrozen – 33 episodes – and look ahead to 2023.

Did you know? You don’t have to catch the stars as they fall. You can listen to any episode from our web site, or on your favorite podcast platform, at any time!

Intro/Outro: “Our Lips are Sealed,” by The Go-Go’s

Discussed:

- A high number of episodes devoted to Peter Rees, the former chief planner of the City of London

o Episode 37: The City is Here for You to Use

o Episode 22: The Engine Room, the City, and Color Commentary

o Episode 21: This is London: Rees Reminiscences

- Stats and demographics

- Fan fave episodes: tied for 125 plays each:

o Episode 32: Future Storage: From Mineral Extraction to Data Forestry (Marina Otero)

o Episode 31: Emergent Tokyo (Jorge Almazan)

- Greg’s favorites:

o Episode 13: What Fresh McMansion Hell is This? (Kate Wagner)

o Episode 26: Big Time (Patrick MacLeamy)

o Episode 27: A Skyscraper Superfan Aims High (Changsub Lee)

o Episode 34: Chicago: Two Guides, One Cast (Laurie Petersen, Vladimir Belogolovsky

o Episode 41: Imagine a City (Mark Vanhoenacker)

o Episode 43: Who is the City For? (Blair Kamin)

- Dan’s favorites:

o Episode 42: 1972: A Spatial Oddity (Noritaka Minami, Iker Gil)

- Guest & adventure pipeline for 2023

o Juan Miro, Miro Rivera Architects on windowless dormitories

o Andrew Shanken – author, The Everyday Life of Memorials

o Andmore Partners – Architects as Developers

o Dan in Hradec Kralove, Czechia

o Greg: The Metaverse Metropolis @ Cornell Tech Urban Hub

o What is the Figma of Autodesk?

o Zach Katz – Transform Your City

Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin’s newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architecture critic Lee Bey, Kamin’s former rival at the Chicago Sun-Times. Listen to the Unfrozen interview with Kamin, and understand why “city planning is not a game of 2D checkers but of 3D chess.”

Intro/Outro: “Chicago” by Benny Goodman

Discussed:

INVEST South/West

Maurice Cox, Chicago Planning Commissioner

The pandemic’s effect on rapid urbanization

Spread of crime from poor to rich neighborhoods

The city’s not “out of control,” but it is in need of reinvention

Lower Manhattan’s adaptive reuse of older skyscrapers does present a template

Decentralization of the central business district, ex: McDonald’s HQ in the Fulton Market

Prospects for Lincoln Yards and The 78 – shades of Cityfront Center?

The Chicago Spire pit / 400 N Lake Shore Drive replacement project

DuSable Park and the Riverwalk

“We have to think of the city not as a 2D checkers game but a 3D chess game.”

Buffalo Bayou Park extension project, Houston

O’Hare Global Terminal

Chicago River Boathouses

AIA design competition for the next bungalow

Committee on Design

“Plop” architecture

1611 W Division  – look ma, no parking!

Red Line South extension

“There are those who say ‘who gets what’ is a tired trope of architectural criticism – let me vehemently disagree.”

Chicago as a participant in global economic and architectural design exchange

Chicago Architecture Biennial

The City that Works > The City that Plays

Investment of Chinese capital in St. Regis Tower

Cloud Gate

Crown Fountain

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.