Unfrozen

39. Seeking the Superfruit of Urbanism

Michael Eliason is an architect and founder of Larch Lab, a studio focused on prefabricated, decarbonized, climate-adaptive, low-energy buildings and livable ecodistricts. Eliason, based in Seattle, had a transformative experience while living in Germany – the American residential model could be greatly improved by adopting some of the principles of Baugruppen – self-developed co-housing, without the granola trappings. Hear the Unfrozen interview – and then listen to his podcast, Livable Low-Carbon City.
Intro/Outro: “Spacelab” by Kraftwerk
Discussed:
Black Sheep Development Co., Larch Lab’s baugruppen partner, headed by Aaron Yankauskas
Ascent, Milwaukee
Jeremy McCloud, Nightingale, Melbourne
California development legislative changes
First Passivhaus in the US: Smith House, Urbana, IL
Minneapolis’ single-family housing zoning rollback experiment
St. Paul’s rent control battle
Product recommendation: Corsi-Rosenthal Box
The north star of Baugruppen: Gleiss 21, Vienna

39. Towards a Non-Combustible Practice, Away from Mundane Endeavors of Indifference

Hanif Kara is a civil and structural engineer and professor in practice at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the co-founder of AKT II, a 350-person engineering practice based in London. The firm won the Stirling Award for Peckham Library in 2000 (with (Will Alsop), the Sainsbury Laboratory in 2012 (with Stanton Williams), and the Bloomberg European Headquarters in 2018 (with Foster + Partners). He is co-author of Blank: Speculations on CLT with Jennifer Bonner, and the recipient of the 2022 Fazlar Khan Lifetime Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
Intro/Outro: Great Things, by Echobelly
Discussed:
One Park Drive (with Herzog & De Meuron)
Castilla (with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners)
240 Blackfriars (with AHMM)
The Tower and the Bridge by David P. Billington
Joint studio with Farshid Moussavi, using reclaimed steel
Google HQ London (with BIG & Heatherwick Studio)
The Francis Crick Institute (with HOK & PLP Architecture)
Culture flaps at SCI-Arc and The Bartlett

37. The City is Here for You to Use

Unfrozen interviews Peter Wynne Rees, Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, who was previously City Planning Officer for the City of  London, from 1985 to 2014. He is a founding member and director  (1990-2022) of the British Council for Offices and received their  President’s Award in 2003 for “presiding over one of the most extensive  periods of redevelopment in the City’s long history”. This is his first appearance on the program, but he has been the subject of two prior episodes, #21, This is London: Rees Remembrances and #22, The Engine Room, the City, and Color Commentary.
Intro/Outro: "The City Is Here for You to Use," by The Futureheads
Discussed:
CTBUH Lynn Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award
Shoreditch
20 Fenchurch Street
Metropolis
Canary Wharf
Favelas
The East End
The cult of home ownership, enforced by government
The Elizabeth Line
HS2
Lifespan of buildings vs building products
What architecture and planning students should be learning

36. Big Time: Patrick MacLeamy

Patrick MacLeamy was the CEO of HOK from 2003 to 2017, capping off a 50-year career at the venerable firm responsible for the National Air and Space Museum, Moscone Center, and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and is credited with creating "The MacLeamy Curve," a touchstone of business guidance for the built environment. In his semi-retirement, he is a founder and chairman of buildingSMART International, which encourages the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and more open collaboration between the design and construction industries. He recently authored "Designing a World-Class Architecture Firm: The People, Stories and Strategies Behind HOK." Hear some of his lifetime's worth of colorful anecdotes and sage advice on this special episode of Unfrozen.
Intro/Outro: "Elevation" by U2
Nuggets:
“We need to think about contractors as our valued colleagues and friends, and change the way we think about our industry. It needs to be more collaborative – design-bid-build is going into the dustbin of history. Collaborative design-build is the way forward.”
“Managing risk and complexity is much easier to do collaboratively. We have to wake up and smell the coffee. The old way of designing and building is changing. If architects want to rejoin society in a special place, they have to adapt. The world needs us, but we need to get the rules of the game changed so we can be successful again.”

35. Architecture of Normal

Daniel Kaven is the author of Architecture of Normal: The Colonization of the American Landscape, a book that views the built environment through the lens of successive developments in transportation. An architect and visual artist hailing from Albuquerque, now calling Portland home, Kaven takes on suburbanization, flying cars, and why “Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”
Intro/Outro: The Big Country, by The Talking Heads
Discussed:
Ed Ruscha
Cibola – one of the Seven Cities of Gold
COVID as accelerant of moving from an experiential lifestyle to a destination-based lifestyle
Instagram feeds are the new main streets of America
United Airlines buys Archer – an air-taxi company
Henry Ford’s flying personal cars department
Prediction: First place to adopt flying cars – Saudi Arabia
The Main Street and Mall Retail Apocalypse
Future infrastructure and traffic planning will be about stratification of means of transport, literally
Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn’t mean we should
Do we want to live in places where we just order online and it gets delivered to a drone pad?
The Big Tech companies are nation-states, or partners thereof
Urbanism had a good run from 1990s to just before COVID.
The post-COVID boom is in places like suburban Boise – Boomtown ZoomTown, and it’s already fizzling.
“Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”
Architecture firms have really phoned in their responsibility to make places where people want to be – as a counterpoint to work-from-home, the tone of which is being set by Facebook and their brethren.
“There is no future with goggles on.”
“We don’t need to rip America apart and build the Metaverse.”
“How can people live a more spacious life in an urban environment?”
“We’re going to regret having made all these 5-over-1 wood-frame buildings with cheap materials.”

34. Chicago: Two Guides, One Cast

Chicago is a famed architecture town, but the road has not always been smooth. Hear from the editor and author, respectively, of two recently released guides – Laurie Petersen for the AIA Guide to Chicago and Vladimir Belogolovskyfor the DOM Architectural Guide Chicago, discourse on Postmodernist icons like the Thompson (future Google?) Center and Harold Washington Library, and muse on what came next, where we are now, and why Chicago is still important to architecture everywhere.

33. Tallest Timber, Boutique Hotels, Pokemon NO! and more…

Dan’s recent consecration of the world’s tallest timber building; Greg’s new gigs, and hotels to stay at while making them happen; the third space in a post-COVID world; update on the Durbin Renewal scandal in Chicago, and a preview of upcoming guests.
Intro/Outro: Super Sex by Morphine
Tall Timber:
Ascent, Milwaukee
Rocket & Tigerli, Winterthur, Switzerland
Atlassian Central, Sydney
Greg’s gig in NYC this week:
Patcraft– Shaw Industries, with:
Brad Hargraeves – Common
Evan Fain – Industrious
Boutique Hotels:
The Freehand N.Y.C.
The Standard L.A.
The Standard High Line N.Y.C.
The Ace Brooklyn
The Ace Portland – have a record player!
Why not the Nakagin Capsule Hotel?
Brooklyn Mirage(Bushwick / Ridgewood)
Brimfield Antique Flea Market – feeding ground for Roman & Williams-designed boutique hotels
Inside Amy Schumer Pretentious Hotel
McKinsey & Co NYC Taskforce to repurpose office space
Mary Ludgin, Heitman, Chicago taskforce
Durbin Renewal: Century and Consumers buildings
Greg’s new gigs
- Undisclosed fellowship, a.k.a. Pokemon NO!: Preparing cities for the metaverse, protecting real public space from virtual reality, unregulated disruptors, and more…
- Parag Khanna startup: Chief Communications Officer: Tool for modeling climate risk. Invest now in the climate-resilient regions of the world. The call is open for volunteers.
Are we living in Ready Player One or Snow Crash?

32. Future Storage: From Mineral Extraction to Data Forestry

Marina Otero, head of the Social Design Masters Program at Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's 2022 Wheelwright Prize. Her study, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, will examine new architecture paradigms for storing data, and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.
Intro:
Lithium, by Nirvana
Discussed:
The Stack, Benjamin Bratton
Ingrid Burrington
Tubes, Andrew Blum
Grow Your Own Cloud
DNA as a storage medium
Seed banks for data
A data garden in Eindhoven
Destinations:
- Singapore: Had a ban on data centers for a number of years; are seaborne and underwater data centers an option? Floating solar farms?
- Darwin, Australia: Data governance – the first indigenous-led data center. Who has access to the data? Who owns it?
- Nigeria: Woman-led crypto-tech communities. Positioning themselves against the corporations that are bringing the infrastructure, so they can set up their own.
- Chile: Lithium extraction, new Humboldt Cable to New Zealand and Australia.
- Iceland and Sweden: Questions connected to industry and energy. Use of new infrastructures. In Sweden, one data center is also a club.
- California: Where new storage media are being developed.
Outro:
A Forest, by The Cure

31. Emergent Tokyo

Think of Tokyo less as a “chaotic” than as an “emergent” city. This means spontaneous, self-organizing aspects create order from the bottom up. That kind of emergence can be, if not designed, then facilitated. Unfrozen interviews Jorge Almazan, Associate Professor, Department of System Design Engineering, Keio University, and author of “Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City.”
Intro: Woman from Tokyo, by Deep Purple
Discussed:
Yokocho Alleys
Zakkyo Buildings
Ankyo Streets
Complexity Science – Geoffrey West
Luis Bettencourt
Cellular Automata – Stephen Wolfram
The Uses of Disorder – Richard Sennett
Rather than a Unified Theory of Emergence applicable to all cities, there are transferable principles:
Economies of Agglomeration rather than Economies of Scale.
Networks versus hierarchies.
Inclusive boundaries (mix of uses).
Bar recommendations:
- Bar Usagi, Shibuya
- The Greek Bar, Suginami
Made in Tokyo, Atelier Bow Wow
Outro: Godzilla, by Blue Oyster Cult

30. True Lies

For a truly philosophical take on the role of the architect in the post-truth era, Unfrozen interviews Richard Francis-Jones, author of Truth and Lies in Architecture.
Intro: “Telling Lies,” by David Bowie
Discussed:
Architecture’s ambiguous relationship to truth.
The criteria that make a building worthy of love.
How can architecture bring us closer to nature?
Architecture is “never neutral nor innocent. There is a mutual interconnection between architecture and the events around it.”
“Eternal principles” or a classicist, colonialist trap?
Ex Machina and the consciousness of materials
Locaton and Vassal
Tsien and Williams
John Keats
Aldo Rossi
Richard Lepastrier
Louis Kahn
David Chalmers
The EY Centre, Sydney
The negative critique culture.
Outro: “True,” by Spandau Ballet