michaelkimmelman

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

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times, joins me for our first One-to-One interview of 2016. I wanted to talk with Kimmelman specifically about a piece he had published just at the end of last year, called “Dear Architects: Sound Matters”. The piece considers how an architectural space’s unique audio atmosphere helps create its overall personality, invariably affecting us as we experience it. Alongside Kimmelman’s writing in the piece are looped videos of different spaces – the New York Times’ office, a restaurant, the High Line, Penn Station, a penthouse – meant to be viewed while wearing headphones, to get to know that space’s sonic portrait, of sorts.

Too often, says Kimmelman, architects don’t think of sound as a material like they would concrete, glass or wood, when it can have a profound effect on the design’s overall impact. In our interview, Kimmelman shares how the piece came to be, and how it fits into the Times’ overall push into more multimedia journalism. We also discuss how Kimmelman’s role as former chief art critic for the Times has influenced his architecture criticism, and how multimedia and VR may affect the discipline.