Design is just one way humanity manifests itself. Our buildings simply express where our culture is. Architects often talk to other architects about architecture, in this time of explosive change, our evolving values are revealed when we understand design.
With support from the Connecticut Architecture Foundation, WPKN Radio, AIA Connecticut, and The Common Edge Collaborative, we are proud to launch the production and recording of the podcast Our Buildings, Our Selves.
Co-Hosted by Architect Duo Dickinson FAIA and Common Edge Founder/Editor Martin Pedersen.
Author, architect and educator Witold Rybczynski, and writer and founder of Studio 360, Kurt Andersen, address the exquisite diversity in our universality without the obsession with “style.”
February 11, 2025
All specializations create their own language, rules, and personalities that reinforce the values of those engaged in it. Architecture is no different. For a century “Modernism” was the base clef of frozen music, defining what was, in fact music, and not noise. Now that orthodoxy, that Canon, is completely destabilized by the Internet. So architecture’s “Great Chef’s” are no longer evident: like music there seem to be few standards of approval: fewer cults. So fewer Cults of Personality.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid all personified architecture: What changed?
March 11, 2025
In many ways, design journalism in the 21st century is in uncharted territory. Digital technology has changed everything, eroding the business models of the previous century and catapulting everyone onto the infinitely fractured world of the internet. Architectural exposure—who’s covered, what’s covered, how its covered—is an entirely different beast today. Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger and Chicago-based design writer and critic Zach Mortice, have unique perspectives on this media transformation, both past and present.
We’re in a housing crisis in the U.S., literally everywhere. Cities, suburbs, and rural areas are, together, millions of units short of what is needed, for a variety of reasons: zoning, construction costs, the vagaries of the free market, neighborhood opposition. Developers seem unable to produce anything but housing at the top of the market, where it’s least needed. And the little bit aimed at the middle they do manage to build is uninspiring and unloved—like a restaurant with “bad food, and small portions,” as one of our guests puts it.
How do we break free of this stalemate? Duo Dickinson and Martin C. Pedersen talk with Gerhard W. Mayer and Lindsey Stirman, co-founders of the Livable Communities Initiative, a Los Angeles–based organization dedicated to creating a new paradigm for housing development. They reject both NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) and its knee-jerk opposite, YIMBYism (yes to any sort of housing, regardless of quality), arguing instead for an altogether different mode: QUIMBY (Quality In My Backyard). Because when housing developments include elements like walkability, green space, gentle density, and access to transit, opposition tends to dissipate.
With Duo Dickinson, FAIA
Whether it is in our homes or on our streets, humans experience what we make. Today, we are all compelled to listen to our health in a time of threatened well-being, but what impacts us every day, impacting how we feel in the world we make for ourselves?
Each month Duo invites guests to discuss topics relevant to HOME that include:
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