​Archinect Sessions Next Up: Exhibit Columbus concludes today with our conversations with the recipients of The J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Today's final episode is a conversation with Sam Jacob​​.​

​Sam Jacob Studio​​ is a London-based practice that works at a variety of scales from urban planning to architecture, design objects, art, and curatorial work. Sam Jacob also currently works as a Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago​, and as a columnist for Art Review. Sam's installation for Exhibit Columbus is located on Washington Street. He treats the six city blocks as a design object in his project titled "Alternative Instruments," telling a story of Utopia from the perspective of both history and fiction, referencing a 16th century novel by Thomas More through symbolism, mapping, and the typography of the Utopian alphabet.

Archinect Sessions Next Up: Exhibit Columbus continues with sharing conversations with the recipients of The J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize. Today's episode is a conversation with Olalekan Jeyifous​​.

Olelakan, who also goes by LEk, as I refer to him in this conversation, is a Nigerian-born visual artist with an architecture degree from Cornell​. His work​ has been widely exhibited at institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA, Vitra Design Museum and the Guggenheim Bilboa. His work ranges from large-scale art commissions in public spaces and festivals to commercial installations. His contribution to this year's Exhibit Columbus is a fascinating hybrid of physical and virtual space entitled Archival/Revival. The installation directly references exhibits at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, the site of the installation, from 1970, celebrating the Black and African arts.

This is the fifth installment of Archinect Sessions six-part series of conversations we've had with architects, designers, and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs and the economy.

Conversations in this episode include Will Galloway, an architect/firm-owner and educator who has been stuck in Canada, his country of citizenship, while unable to return to Tokyo, his home of residence. We also speak with Sobia Sayeda, an architect in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Dillon Jones, a Portland-based architect who has been sheltering-in-place in California since getting furloughed. 

Architect Sean Lally of Weathers runs the podcast Night White Skies: "A podcast about architecture's future, as both Earth's environment and our human bodies are now open for design."

The podcast is in its infancy, but Lally has already logged some really fascinating interviews with the likes of Timothy Morton, architect Mitchell Joachim, and architects/authors Geoffrey Thün & Kathy Velikov. Lally joins us on this week's show to talk about the podcasting+architecture game, and the architect's collaborative role in science and technology.

Beginning today through October 1, Columbus, Indiana will celebrate its architectural history and identity with its very first Exhibit Columbus—an annual event alternating between a symposium and a design exhibition. Known for its rich architectural holdings of work by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei, Deborah Berke, Richard Meier, Robert Venturi and others, Columbus has earned its "Athens of the prairie" tagline, and Exhibit Columbus hopes to honor that proud tradition into the future.

We're joined by key members of Exhibit Columbus, Richard McCoy (director of the symposium's parent company, Landmark Columbus) and Joshua Coggeshall (partner at Shimizu + Coggeshall and co-director of next year's Ball State University installations) to discuss the city's architectural heritage, and what's planned for this year's inaugural symposium.

Alvin Huang, founder and principal of Synthesis Design + Architecture in Los Angeles, joins us to talk about growing his practice into the award-winning firm it is today. Alvin dips back into his time in London, going to school at the AA and working with Zaha, and shares the terror and excitement that is starting your own firm. We also discuss taking criticism on social media, firm/teaching/life balance, and computation's role in design.

In a landmark decision last month, Columbia University graduate students won the right to unionize in a case filed against the National Labor Relations Board. As a result, graduate students in private universities across the U.S. now have the right to collectively bargain. What effect does this have on architecture student labor, and the valuation of architecture overall?

We're joined this week by special guest A.L. Hu, a third-year GSAPP MArch student and key organizer with Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW). Hu shared what's happening at the school after the landmark decision, and how these organizing efforts can affect the architecture profession overall.

We're joined this week by Devin Gharakhanian, co-founder and co-creative director of the online platform SuperArchitects, to discuss his work in architecture media and community-building, alongside issues troubling architecture education and the public's perception of the profession.

Gharakhanian was inspired to start SuperArchitects to share architecture theses globally, feeling they are under-appreciated and underexposed. Frustrated by the gap between education and practice he experienced after graduating from Woodbury, he left traditional architecture to focus on exposing architects and their work to as wide an audience as possible, mostly through social media platforms.

Closing out August's special theme of Games, we're joined this week by Quilian Riano to talk through all the ways games can help architects reimagine not only their designs and design processes, but also their own role in the system and structures of city building. We discuss Quilian's recent piece for Archinect on his own work with games in pedagogy, practice and protest, and share our other experiences at the intersection of games and architecture.

This week's show is dedicated to Louisville, and we're delighted to share the mic with longtime Archinect favorite Steven Ward. Steven is an architect and partner at Studio Kremer Architects, teacher and architecture critic/cheerleader for the local independent paper LEO Weekly. We discuss his recent writings, in particular his survey of the recently completed Speed Art Museum, and the differences between local architecture criticism vs national criticism. We also find our what's going on with OMA's Food Port project. 

The term "zoning" recently celebrated its 100-year anniversary in the U.S.'s city planning parlance, and many of our News postings recently have had to do with its fraught, wonky legacy. From racial segregation to housing discrimination to Pokémon Go trespassers, we dip into the debate around zoning, with special guest Mitch McEwen.

Peter Zumthor released new renderings for his LACMA redesign last week, and boy are people not impressed! We talk about the "undercooked" look of Zumthor's snaking concrete inkblot plan for the museum, and experiment with a new segment devoted to ranting. You've been warned.

The last few weeks have been a bit of a downer—we had a big ol' roundtable on how Brexit is changing architecture practice and education, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions raged, and Rio is coping (somewhat) with its Olympic stress. Now, we're in need of some lighter fare. We wanted to take a moment in the summer heat to check-in with what Donna and Ken have been up to, and pass on some of our own recommendations for what to read and listen to this summer.

Also featuring: Ken dishing about Guy Fieri and vegan butchers, Donna giving us the latest on her husband's giant installation in Rancho Cucamonga, and "a really fun text book".

Shownotes:

Archinect's theme for August is Games – check out our open call.

The Olympics begin tomorrow! Get caught up with what's been happening in Rio

At home in a changing climate: strategies for adapating to sea level rise

Revok, the artist who painted Brian's "Native" palm tree installation.

Melania Trump's website disappears after architecture degree claim is debunked

Phoenix May become a Lot More Green (more info here from Donna)

UK architecture students seeking mental health care is on the rise, according to Architects' Journal survey (more info here from Ken)

New Sandy Hook elementary really looks like a church

Summer Recommendations:

What we're reading:

• Donna: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, and Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters
• Ken: Man, Play and Games, by Roger Caillois, Teach Your Chicken to Fly Training Manual, by Trevor Weekes
• Amelia: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, and You'll Grow Out of It, by Jessi Klein

What we're listening to: listen on our YouTube playlist.

This is the fourth part of Archinect Sessions six-part series of conversations we've had with architects, designers, and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs and the economy.

Conversations in this episode include four architects and designers based in New York - Brandt Knapp & Jerome Haferd​ of Brandt : Haferd, Ari​elle Lapp​​​, and Emma Greenberg​.

We're now about a month past the UK's historic 'Brexit' vote to leave the European Union, and, well, lots has happened. David Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister, and was replaced two weeks ago by fellow Conservative, Theresa May. The economy has drastically slowed down as the value of the pound against the dollar dipped to historic lows, and while there's plenty of gloomy prospects, there are even more unknowns.

To check in on how UK architecture is getting on, and it's sights for a post-EU future, we are joined by architects Rob Hyde (principal lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture), Katy Marks (founder of Citizens Design Bureau), and Mark Middleton (partner at Grimshaw in London).

While the separation from the EU could be severe for UK architects—in particular its threat to the EU's "free movement" that entitles its members to live and work in any of its constituent countries—our guests were cautiously optimistic. Paraphrasing Katy Marks, architects are the ones who listen, respond to and ultimately shape the debate around the built environment, giving them a valuable spot in the fray.

If you're an architect in the UK, or have been affected by Brexit in any way, we want to hear from you! Take our anonymous survey; we'll publish a report on the results in the near future.

When Indianapolis began demolishing its RCA Dome in 2008, Michael Bricker saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. To save the stadium's white, Teflon-coated fiberglass roof from the landfill, Bricker salvaged 13 acres of it, and turned it into shade structures for the city, as well as locally-designed accessories. With this project, People for Urban Progress was born.

Bricker is the Founder and Executive Director of People for Urban Progress, aka PUP, based in Indianapolis. The non-profit is focused on diverting building materials from wasting away in landfills, and repurposing it for local improvements. Trained as an architect and also working as a production designer, Bricker has gone on with PUP to turn old stadium seats into bus stops, and fabric from Superbowl XLVI into handbags. Sessions' own Donna Sink is a board member at PUP, and Bricker joined us on the podcast to discuss the organization's goals and design ethos.

As a bonus for Sessions listeners, get 15% off anything in PUP's store by entering "archinect" as the coupon code at checkout.

This week on the podcast, Julia Ingalls joins us to discuss the byzantine considerations behind how architects charge for work, and shares some helpful guidelines from her recent piece about how residential architecture fee rates are determined.

We also dip into the recent $3M lawsuit against Architecture for Humanity for allegedly misusing restricted funds. After suddenly going bankrupt last year, many of AFH's volunteer cells have continued operating, and an offshoot organization, Open Architecture Collaborative, officially launched this past March. The lawsuit against AFH's founders could shed light into why the lauded nonprofit seemed to shutter so suddenly.

This episode of Archinect Sessions is sponsored by AIA Advantage Partner, BQE Software, and the makers of ArchiOffice. ArchiOffice is the only Office and Project Management Software built with the needs of architects in mind. It will help you manage people and projects, while you focus on designing great architecture. Our podcast listeners can get a fully functional 15-day trial of ArchiOffice at www.bqe.com/Archinect.

Wrapping up our special editorial theme for June 2016, Privacy, Archinect writers Julia Ingalls and Nicholas Korody join us on the podcast this week to discuss two of their recent features—Julia's piece on banking security with input from a reformed robber, and Nicholas' interview with the architecture firm that moonlights as a government whistleblower, posting hundreds of secret documents online.

Last Thursday, Great Britain voted to leave the European Union, with a margin of 52% to 48%. The result was a huge surprise—especially for those in creative industries like architecture, many of whom publicly supported the Remain campaign. While no official exit strategy is yet in place, within hours of the 'Brexit' vote becoming clear, the British pound dropped 10% in value against the US dollar (the lowest it's been since the 1980s). Prime Minister David Cameron resigned shortly after, and many British architects are wondering what the hell will happen now.

Speaking from his position as Principal Lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture, Rob Hyde joined us on the podcast this week to talk about the mood in the UK post-Brexit, and how architects are carrying on.

In light of the recent killing of 49 people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando known to many as a center for Queer and Latinx culture, our focus for this week’s podcast is the role and significance of queer spaces in creating community and culture.

We wanted to use this time to encourage constructive discussion of why recognizing, and preserving (in some way), these 'third spaces' is so important. Not just for those who identify as queer or the Latinx community, but for creating diverse, welcoming urban spaces for all.

We’re joined by two guests, Susan Surface: a queer designer, curator, organizer, and the program director at Design in Public in Seattle, and James Rojas: an urban planner trained at MIT and specializing in cultural landscapes, who has written extensively about Latino urbanism.

This week, we’re taking a moment to catch-up with what’s happened on Archinect lately, and share some endorsements—we discuss our latest interview with Snøhetta, our ongoing coverage of the Venice Biennale, student work on refugee camps, and more.

Next week, in light of the shooting death of 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, we plan to discuss the significance of accessible queer spaces, for all members of a city community.

This year's winning Serpentine Pavilion, designed by BIG, came with an architectural posse—for the first time in the Serpentine Pavilion's history, the annual competition also featured four "Summer Houses" designed by other international architects. The pavilion and summer houses open to the public tomorrow on the Serpentine Galleries' lawn in London's Royal Kensington Gardens, and we discuss our initial take on their at once surprising and familiar elements.

Get briefed on the pavilion and the summer houses with Robert Urquhart's coverage here.

Andrea Dietz spent four days in Venice reporting on the Biennale's opening for us, and brought back her reflections on the hallowed event—in all its chaotic, problematic, inspiring, messy glory—to discuss with us on the podcast. Amidst the fray, one thing came out clearly: the map is not the territory.

Donna, Ken and Fred all converged in the meatspace that was the AIA National Convention last week in Philadelphia – to explore the massive Expo floor, visit local architecture, vote on resolutions and oh yes, those keynotes (!) from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Neri Oxman and Rem Koolhaas. Spoiler alert: Rem's was the most boring.

For more information about the resolutions up for debate at the convention, check out our episode with Gregory Walker covering unpaid internships and WTC-truthers.

And don't forget to check out our ongoing coverage of the 2016 Venice Biennale – we collaborated with the Taubman students setting up the US Pavilion, have a bunch of interviews with curators in the Features, and will soon be publishing dispatches from Venice to the News.

Shownotes:

Fred Scharmen's work with outer space for The Working Group on Adaptive Systems

LMN Architects in Seattle named AIA's 2016 firm of the year

Architecture Lobby's collaboration with Slought on (Re)Working Architecture

Neri Oxman’s 'Qamar' wearable for extraterrestrial environments

Today we share the third part of Archinect Sessions six-part series of conversations​ we've had with architects, designers, and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs​ and the economy​.

Conversations in this episode include Nicolai Kruger​, an architect and illustrator in Portland, Oregon; Charles Pifer​, a practicing architect and teacher of architectural ethics, in Tucson, Arizona; and Michele Grace Hottel​, an architect/sole-proprietor in La Mesa, California​.

Since North Carolina passed the controversial bill known as HB-2 at the end of March—requiring transgender people to use bathrooms that coincide with the sex listed on their birth certificate, and forbidding city or county legislatures from passing counter-measures that protect against LGBT discrimination—the state has lost an estimated $40 million in business investment, and researchers project that total annual costs due to the bill could tally $5 billion. On May 9, the US Department of Justice sued North Carolina, stating that the law violated the Civil Rights Act, among others. North Carolina filed two lawsuits the same day to defend the measure.

Among the many other performers and businesses that have divested from North Carolina in protest of the law, AIA's South Atlantic Region (including Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina) announced on April 25 that it would no longer hold its September conference in Wilmington. You can read their statement here.

Former AIA Georgia President Gregory Walker, a long-time 'Nector and principal at Houser Walker Architects, joins us to discuss his chapter's decision. And as AIA National is just around the corner, we also discuss AIA Georgia's resolution16-2 to quell unpaid internships.

This week on the podcast, Donna, Ken and Amelia discuss the uncertain future of downtown Atlanta's brutalist Public Library (the last building Marcel Breuer designed), how Shigeru Ban's relief efforts in Ecuador relate to his celebrity, and the emergence of a heavy-hitting lobbyist group for driverless cars in the US.

Shownotes:

News pieces discussed in this show:

• Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehicles
• Shigeru Ban arrives in Ecuador to train locals in relief architecture
• Breuer's Brutalist library in downtown Atlanta faces demolition

The campaign to save Marcel Breuer's Grosse Central Pointe Library, started on Archinect

Venice Biennale director Alejandro Aravena: "Our challenge must be to go beyond architecture."

This week we’re joined by special guest co-host Aaron Betsky, author of Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire and Building Sex: Men, Women, Architecture & the Construction of Sexuality. As a strong presence in the architectural discourse of gender and sexuality since the 1990s, Betsky discusses with us a few of our recent Features published under April's special editorial theme, Sex, including:

• The enduring influence of "Playboy Architecture"
• Screen/Print #41: "Family Planning" from Harvard Design Magazine
• The gimp room, the padded cell, the medical office: inside the world of Kink.com
• Transparent Motives: the ins and outs of sex-specific architecture
• "The difference between porn and erotica is the lighting." – One-to-One #19 with Jake Jaxson, CEO and Creative Director at CockyBoys

Betsky was last on the podcast in his current professional capacity as the dean at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin, to talk about the school's then-uncertain future. You can listen to that episode here.

The sudden death of Dame Zaha Hadid could not also mean the end of Zaha Hadid Architects. With major projects still ongoing all over the world, the firm had to keep things running strong, focusing on the future while managing grief. After working with Zaha for nearly thirty years, Patrik Schumacher has now taken over leadership at the firm, and joins us on the podcast to discuss what it was like collaborating with her "killer instinct", and how he can continue honoring the "DNA" of her work.

We're joined by original 'Nector and senior editor Orhan Ayyüce to discuss Zaha Hadid's legacy and his recent piece on LA's industrial urbanism, part of our architectural travel guide through cities worldwide. As a student at SCI-Arc, Ayyüce was first taken aback by Hadid during a visiting lecture she gave in 1985, before she had completed any built work: "I was very impressed by her at that lecture and her strengths and vulnerabilities made a lasting place in my memory bank." We share the impressions she and her work had on us personally, as well as Archinect's memory bank.

Last week we witnessed the loss of Dame Zaha Hadid, one of architecture's most formidable and prolific talents. We'll be devoting a later podcast episode to remembering her and honoring her work. Until then, we'll continue catching you up with the most significant architecture news from the past week.

This episode we discuss Alejandro Aravena's Pritzker acceptance speech (and the designs he's giving away for free), how NASA is experimenting with inflatable space houses, how we "crave" public space, and Nicholas Korody joins us to discuss the cockroach of unpaid architecture internships (they just won't die).

Shownotes:

Zaha Hadid Dies at Age 65

The NASA-grade work of Garrett Finney

Quilian Riano's Who Owns Space project  

Woman calls out Florida Governor Rick Scott in a Starbucks

Collecting the most important news of the past week – that is, from the recording date's perspective of March 30th, the day before Zaha Hadid's sudden death – this episode brings stories on: the winning below-grade skyscraper (sinkscrapers?) of eVolo's Skyscraper Competition; a long-lost Le Corbusier tapestry returning to the Sydney Opera House; another twist on co-habitation in the co-work startup, PodShare; Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects taking "revenge" on Charles Moore's Hood Museum; and our future of eating sandwiches while robots do our work. 

We'll discuss the late Dame Zaha Hadid's legacy on next week's podcast.

This past week on Archinect, we heard Thom Mayne's story of "jazz, sex, and the alienation of singular genius" in Julia Ingalls' interview with the Morphosis lead, and hypothesized on the future of architectural work in a world of full automation and universal basic income, based onNicholas Korody's interview with the co-authors behind Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Both Ingalls and Korody join us on the podcast to delve deeper into these pieces, and share some juicy tidbits that couldn't make the cut to print.

While Amelia is away this week, Alexander Walter fills in and joins Ken, Donna and me for a conversation about competitions, in a celebration of the re-launch of our sister site Bustler. In addition to discussing the new website and its new features, we also talk about the controversial new "Border Wall" competition and look at some current competitions worth checking out. 

Spring is just around the corner, and in the interest of new beginnings and rebirth, Archinect Sessions is taking this week off to get some much needed rest. The market is hot right now, and we're running on all cylinders just to keep up.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode, devoted specifically to competitions in honor of Bustler's new redesign, and until then, we've got a special half-episode to tide you over. Paul and I run through the recent news and recommend a few episodes to get caught up with to while we're on break (links to all in the shownotes below).

Today we share the second part of Archinect Sessions six-part series of conversations we've had with architects, designers, and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs and the economy.

In this second part, we feature the perspectives of Autumn, a commercial interior designer in Chicago; Daniel, a project architect/project manager in Oakland; and Casey, an American architect working in Berlin.

A new Texas state law going into effect on August 1 will allow concealed handguns to be brought into public university campus buildings. This isn't sitting well with many members of the public university system, as educators and administrators are now tasked with regulating the presence of guns inside studios and classrooms, and fear that such a law will scare people away from the school (not to mention the obvious safety concerns). Dean of the architecture school, Frederick "Fritz" Steiner, has been critical of the law from its inception, and faced with having to enforce it as campus policy, was prompted to leave UT-Austin for the deanship at PennDesign.

While not the sole reason for his resignation, Steiner is adamant that such a law is simply not good for architecture education and studio culture, and joins us on the podcast to discuss.

The tragedy of Flint, Michigan's water crisis seems to worsen with every newly uncovered detail. As a manmade public health crisis provoked by willful denial and compromised safety standards, the entirely preventable poisoning of Flint's water supply with lead stands not only as a failure to care for the citizens of one city, but as a dreadful harbinger for the U.S.'s deteriorating infrastructure networks.

Like any concerned citizen, Filnt-based architect Kurt Neiswender sees this as a call to action to help any way he can. Kurt joins us on the podcast this week to discuss how architects might apply their skills to improve such a monstrous situation, and address the real limitations the profession has when it comes to these scenarios.

We swear, no BIG or Trump on this episode. We discuss the donation of Lautner's breathtaking Sheats-Goldstein house, complete with jungle, nightclub and infinity tennis court, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to become the museum's first acquired piece of architecture (along with a sizable endowment for maintenance). The U.S. saw a major step forward into the realm of driverless cars, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google that its computers in autonomous vehicles could legally be counted as drivers, while the internet ogled Nissan's self-parking office chairs.

It's also that time of year again, when the AIA announces the keynote speakers for its National Convention (check out our podcast on last year's convention in Atlanta), and this year's threw us for a loop – first, actor Kevin Spacey was named as Day 1 speaker, and praised for his "disruption" of "appointment television". Neri Oxman will give the Day 2 keynote, a very solid choice if not somewhat experimental for the AIA crowd. Then, a big kahuna – Rem Koolhaas was named Day 3 speaker, with a talk titled "Delirious Philadelphia" (where the Convention will take place this year). We mull over the rationale behind such a smattering of keynotes, and take a look back at prior keynotes.

Lastly, we tackle a brazen piece by architect Duo Dickinson, that claims contemporary architecture has changed from a respectable, pragmatic profession into a lifestyle choice. 

Long-time Archinector and reliably sane commentator Will Galloway joins us from his base in Tokyo to discuss the weekly news, including his interview with Assemble, crucially taking place mere weeks before they won the Turner Prize. Otherwise, while news from Bjarke Ingels Group commanded the feistiest comment threads – with renderings of BIG's spiraling Hudson Yards tower provoking debate over craft in skyscrapers, and the firm being selected to design the Serpentine Pavilion for 2016 in their last last eligible year – the last week included big news for firms both star-studded and unknown. MoMA PS1 named Escobedo Solíz Studio as the 2016 winner of its Young Architects Program, for their "Weaving the Courtyard" submission, while Dame Zaha Hadid received her RIBA Gold Medal (the first woman to win solo). And for you planning wonks, we throw in a brief discussion of a controversial proposed ballot measure to halt big developments in Los Angeles. 

Virtual Reality is very much here, in all its messy, beautiful, uncanny glory. The gee-whiz factor notwithstanding, the technology holds a bevy of architectural applications and implications, and manages to hold a mirror up to the built environment to show us things that we couldn't understand before.

This episode, we discuss a host of recent VR stories, from the narrative VR journalism of Emblematic Group to Thorsten Wiedemann's VR performance art, an AR helmet that streamlines the construction site and VR-value-added rendering services for firms.

Joining us on this VR-trip is Rebecca Howard, freshly returned from New York where she developed video content for the Times, and helped them launch their entry into VR content.

Back in December of last year, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture launched in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, featuring an exhibition curated by Los Angeles-based critic Mimi Zeiger and designer Tim Durfee. Their show, “Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City,” winner of the Biennale’s Bronze Dragon, reconsiders what makes up today’s idea of a “city”, specifically regarding our digital and virtual presences, as well as contemporary issues of globalized economies.

Mimi and Tim joined Paul and I in Archinect’s podcasting studio to talk about the exhibition, and introduce a discussion recorded in Shenzhen among the participants of “Now, There" and one of the Biennale’s curators, Aaron Betsky. Their conversation, “Where is now; When is then” makes up the meat of this Bonus Session.

The exhibition features work by Besler & Sons, Walton Chiu, Tim Durfee and Ben Hooker (with Jenny Rodenhouse), John Szot Studio, m-a-u-s-e-r, and Metahaven, as well as texts by Joanne McNeil, Enrique Ramirez, and Therese Tierney.

For our 50th (!!!) episode, we discuss the biggest news items from the last week – everything from the latest BIG and DS+R shake-ups to a surprisingly controversial Seattle homeless shelter – and it's been a doozy. We take a look at:

The "sphincter from which digital art issues" (according to one Archinect commenter), aka DS+R's new Berkeley Art Museum; the controversy surrounding BIG's latest client (referred to here as the Washington "Pigskins"); recent discussions of diversity issues that have arisen on the site; the 25-year old who won a big World War I memorial design contest; MoMA's updated expansion plans; Architecture for Humanity's potential second life; and more.

As last week's episode was taken up by Pritzker-hooplah, this episode takes a look back at the major news items of the last week(ish) and gets you caught up with what's been happening on Archinect.

We discuss: the recent photo exhibition on homelessness at USC (which closes tomorrow!); the Treasury Department's controversial new practice of tracking and identifying secret buyers of luxury housing; how BIG's 2 World Trade Center is now in limbo after "anchor tenant" Rupert Murdoch has pulled out; the demolition of yet another not-beloved-enough Brutalist building; the big ol' chunk of cash the U.S. now has to prepare for driverless cars; and the ongoing debacle over the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, as Zaha Hadid Architects accuses Kengo Kuma Associates of copying their design, while Japan won't pay ZHA until they hand over the design copyrights.

When news broke yesterday that Alejandro Aravena was the winner of this year's Pritzker Architecture Prize, reactions were generally positive, but a bit conflicted. Aravena's most known, and cited by the Pritzker, for his work on social housing projects in his home base of Santiago de Chile, where he operates as the executive director of the "do tank", ELEMENTAL. And few would contest that his work is worthy of the prize, despite the fact that he's only 48.

But Aravena was also a Pritzker juror from 2009 - 2015, serving alongside jurors who ultimately chose to cite him, and he isn't the first winner to have previously served on the jury. This makes it impossible to ignore criticism that the award tends to stay within a pretty tight-knit circle of practitioners. Often described as the most prestigious architecture award out there, what is the point of the prize nowadays, and is its significance justified?

We wanted to know more about how the Pritzker is awarded, and its self-awareness in the eye of architects as well as the greater public. On the day the Pritzker was announced, Martha Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Prize, generously gave us insight into "the room where it happens" – how the jury's deliberation work, and why Aravena's work is deserving of the prize.

Architect, artist, and experimental preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos has created scents for Philip Johnson's Glass House, removed centuries of dust from the inside of Trajan's Column with latex, and is the newly appointed director of the Historic Preservation program at Columbia University's GSAPP, where he also began the "Future Anterior" journal. And this week, he joins us on the podcast to discuss ideas that he mulls over constantly in his work – what role should originality play in architecture? What's at stake when discourse and criticism come to rely more on representations than the in situ structure? And what role do media and virtual realities play in all of this?

This episode is brought to you by BQE ArchiOffice. Check out their offer for Archinect Sessions listeners at bqe.com/startups.

Today's installment of Archinect Sessions introduces the first of six episodes sharing conversations we've had with architects, designers. and others in the industry. The discussions address the challenges experienced navigating these uncertain times, from the stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, to the toll it's taken on jobs and the economy.

In this first part, we feature the perspectives of Zachary, a recently laid-off unlicensed architectural designer in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Nancy, an architect-turned-architectural-consultant in New York; and an architect in Glasgow, Scotland, who wishes to remain unnamed because of the potentially-illegal layoffs he's been the victim of in recent months.

For our final Mini-Session from the Next Up series, Nicholas Korody interviews TOMA, a Santiago-based collective. TOMA build politically-charged social spaces, using design as a strategy for bringing people together rather than as an end in itself. With their installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Escuelopolis, the Chilean architects catalogued and mapped the connections between their home-base and the Midwestern metropolis, honing in on the exportation of neoliberalism to South America by the University of Chicago-trained “Chicago Boys.”

Regularly printing newspapers to document their research as it occurred, TOMA invited visitors and participants to the Biennial to actively participate in their architectural research, gathering people together to consider the processes that keep us apart.

'Tis the time of year for reflections and speculations – and 2015 was a big one for Archinect Sessions. We launched our first ever live podcasting series, Next Up, at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles and at the first Chicago Architecture Biennial; we started a brand new interviews-only show, One-to-One; and we spoke with some of the biggest names and most compelling up-and-comers in the profession.

On this episode, we revisit our predictions from last year's final episode, reflect on the past year in podcasting news, and share theories for what may come in 2016.

Over Skype from their homebase in Beijing, WAI Architecture Think Tank partners Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski spoke with Paul Petrunia, on our latest Mini-Session for the Next Up series. Their contribution to the Chicago Architecture Biennial, a rumination on manifestos, looks to the potential forms of architectural persuasion in any medium.