Unfrozen

A former president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Carl Elefante has led the field in finding common ground between two things seemingly in conflict: sustainable design and historic preservation. He is a Principal Emeritus with Quinn Evans and a charter member of the Climate Heritage Network. In addition to his work on the intersection of historic preservation and sustainability, he has spent decades focusing on buil...

Hillary Brown, Professor Emerita of Architecture at the City College of New York, joins Unfrozen to discuss her book Revitalize | Resettle, which explores how climate migration and rural revitalization can solve interlinked crises. Brown emphasizes that large U.S. cities alone cannot absorb climate-displaced populations due to infrastructural limits and rising costs. Instead, she proposes strategic resettlement in small towns and “...

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 Ico...

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 pick...

Our guest on this episode is Christopher Hawthorne, the Senior Critic at Yale University’s School of Architecture. His previous roles include architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, and Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles. His current mission is to assemble the Speaker’s Corner at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Unfrozen hears his unique perspective as both critic and exhibitor.

--

Intro/Outro: “Elevator,” ...

A quick one before we’re away. Dan and Greg sum up theirsprings and get ready for spritzes and socializing with smart people in at the 2025 Venice Biennale.

--

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

--

Discussed:

Going Underground -> The Space Below w/ James Parakh

·        Toronto PATH

·        Montreal RESO

·        Chicago Pedway

·        Minneapolis Skyway

·        Houston Tunnels

·        Oklahoma City Unde...

Sara Bronin is an architect, attorney, policymaker, and professor at Cornell University. Born and raised in Houston, the only large US city without zoning, previously served as the Chair of the Planning and Zoning Commission of Hartford, Connecticut. Her book is called Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World, and she joins Unfrozen to demystify the why and wherefore of what you can, cannot, and “must” build in cities all ove...

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 pl...

Jason Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University Newark and one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers. His new book, out May 14, 2024, is Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers. In it, Barr takes a global view of why the quest to build up is as fierce as ever, and why skyscrapers remain so controversial. Join the Unfrozen interview with Barr, in which some record-...

In To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century, Richard Weller, Professor Emeritus and Co-Founder of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania, has condensed a sprawling subject into a compact field guide to 120 of the most significant 21st century objects, from bulldozers to Biosphere II. Call it dystopian, call it optimistic. Just don’t call it “anthroporn.”

--

Intro/Ou...

Chris Hytha and Mark Houser are collaborators on Highrises: Art Deco, a multimedia series chronicling the great skyscraper edifices of the roaring ‘20s. Photographed by drones and meticulously measured and researched, the series – a book, prints, website, mobile phone wallpaper and exhibition -- reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons. Catch the in-person book talk on July 18 and the exhibition fr...

“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 differe...

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.

--

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

--

Discussed:

-...

“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 wa...

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 battl...

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 coast...

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.

--

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

--

Show Notes:

- Previous work:

• - ...

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.

--

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

Show Notes:

- The "Joy" Thing with Tim Walz

- Obama > Biden ...