Unfrozen – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Chicago’s Wrigley Building, constructed in 1921, is the “whited sepulcher” of Michigan Avenue, gleaming in terra cotta like the rows of teeth ostensibly cleansed by Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, the company that built the Beaux-Arts edifice. But its extravagant looks are only part of the story. Unfrozen hosts Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren, who wrote and photographed the new book from Rizzoli, The Wrigley Building: The Making of an Icon, to hear the rest.

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Intro / Outro:

“24 Hour Limes,” by The Cooper Vane

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Discussed:

• Graham, Anderson, Probst & White
• Charles Beersman
• Julia Morgan
• Arts Club of Chicago
• Joe Mansueto
• Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, Helmut Jahn, 2011
• John Vinci
• Phillip Wrigley
• William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson
• Girilda Tower, Seville
• Chateau Chambord, Loire Valley, France
• New York Municipal Building, Stanford White, 1914
• The Carter Family
• Tribune Tower, Howells and Hood, 1925
• London Guarantee Building, Alfred Alschuler, 1923
• 333 North Michigan Avenue, Holabird & Roche, 1928
• Belden-Stratford Hotel, Meyer Fridstein, 1923
• Waldor-Astoria Chicago, Lucien Lagrange, 2009
• Chicago Fire Stadium
• Stanley Tigerman
• Studio Blue, Cheryl Towler Weese

The Unfrozen crew hit the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale with all the furious energy our 100th episode deserved. A rollicking roundup of robots, pans, picks, porches and pavilions, with special guest interviews: Michele Champagne, Kate Wagner, Marisa Moran Jahn, Bekim Ramku, Rafi Segal, Jeanne Gang, and Mark Cavagnero. And finally, while Rome picked a pontiff, we had our own mini-conclave in Venice and humbly offered up our picks for the 20th Biennale curator. Join us for this extra special centenary episode.

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

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Discussed:

-      Olly Wainwright: Can robots make the perfect Aperol spritz? – Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 review | Architecture | The Guardian

-         Rowan Moore: Venice Architecture Biennale review: ‘a hot mess of pretension’ | The Observer

-         The New York Architecture Review crew: Nicolas, Chloe and Sammy

-         International Exhibition in the Arsenale

o  Robots, hemp, bio-concrete, 8-point font with AI-assisted summaries

o  Kate Crawford and Vladan Joier’s megascale text: Calculating Empires

o   Bjarke Ingels Group’s entry: Ancient Future, with Bhutanese carvers paced by an ABB robot

o  Christopher Hawthorne’s Speaker’s Corner

o  Shades of Rem Koolhaas’ 2014 Fundamentals edition

-         Kate Wagner’s review:

o  Dated techno-optimism

o  Cannibalism of architecture by art and exhibition design

-         National Pavilions:

o  Austria: “Agency for Better Living”

o  Canada: “Picoplanktonics” by The Living Room Collective

o  Denmark: “Build of Site”

o  Estonia: “Let Me Warm You”

o  Romania: “Human Scale”

o  Saudi Arabia: “The Um Slaim School: An Architecture of Connection”

o  Slovenia: “Master Builders”

o  South Korea: “Little Toad, Little Toad”, but mainly this cat

o  Spain: “Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium”

o  UAE: “Pressure Cooker”

o  USA: “Porch: An Architecture of Generosity”

§  Curators:

·        Peter MacKeith, Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas

·        Rod Bigelow, Executive Director, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art

·        Marlon Blackwell, Marlon Blackwell Architects

·        Susan Chin, Design Connects

·        Stephen Burks, Man Made

§  Shades of the timber-themed 2021 exhibit, but with a twist

§  Interview with Mark Cavagnero, Mark Cavagnero Associates, on participation in Porch and his work updating the original 1969 design of the Oakland Museum of California by Kevin Roche and Dan Kiley

o  Uzbekistan: A Matter of Radiance

-         Interview with collaborators on Art-Tek Tulltorja, conversion of former brick works into a tech hub and community center, Pristina, Kosovo:

o  Rafi Segal, Associate Professor, Architecture & Urbanism, MIT

o  Marisa Moran Jahn, Director, Integrated Design,Parsons School of Design

o  Bekim Ramku, OUD+ Architects

o  Nol Binakaj, OUD+ Architects

-         Interview with Jeanne Gang, amidst a Bio-Blitz powered by the iNaturalist app and featuring a “disco ball for bees”

-         Unfrozen’s nominations for 2027 Biennale curator:

o  Carolyn Whitzman, Senior Housing Researcher, Schoolof Cities, University of Toronto and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis

o  Diane Longboat, Senior Manager, StrategicInitiatives, Center for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto

§  See: Sweat lodge at the Center

o  Patrick Bellew, Chief Sustainability Officer, Surbana Jurong (Atelier Ten)

§  Gardens by the Bay cooling system,powered by incinerated tree trimming waste

o  Peter Barber, Peter Barber Architects

o  Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture

-         Stafford Beer: “The purpose of the system is what it does.”

“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)

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?

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
• 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

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