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Night White Skies

Join Sean Lally in conversation about architecture’s future, as both earth’s environment and our human bodies are now open for design. The podcast engages a diverse range of perspectives to get a better picture of the events currently unfolding. This includes philosophers, cultural anthropologists, policy makers, scientists as well as authors of science fiction. Each individual’s work intersects this core topic, but from unique angles. Sean Lally is an architect based in Lausanne, Switzerland. His office, Sean Lally Architecture, is dedicated to engaging today’s greatest pressures - a changing climate and advances in healthcare and consumer devices that are redefining the human bodies that occupy our environments. Lally is the author of the ‘The Air from Other Planets: A Brief History of Architecture to Come’ (Lars Muller). Lally has lectured worldwide and has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, Pratt Institute and Rice University. Lally is the recipient of the Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New York and the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in Landscape Architecture. www.seanlally.net
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Now displaying: 2016
Dec 12, 2016

David Gissen is the author of books, essays, exhibitions and experimental writings and projects about environments, landscapes, cities, and buildings from our time and the historical past.

David is Professor of Architecture and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts, a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University, and a visiting critic at numerous schools in the United States and Europe where he lectures and teaches in the areas of architecture, urban, and landscape history-theory, writing and design. At CCA, he co-directs the Experimental History Project and the MAAD HTX degree. 

Nov 28, 2016

Geoff Manaugh is the founder and author of the BLDGBLOG website. Manaugh is a former editor at Dwell magazine, former Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo, and a contributing editor at Wired UK.   Manaugh is the editor of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions. Most recently, he is the author of the book ‘A Burglars Guide to the City’ which is being adapted for television by CBS studios.

 

Nov 21, 2016

"Is Climate an Architectural Design Problem?"

Albert Pope is the Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture. He teaches in the school's Undergraduate and Graduate Program and is currently the director of the school’s Present/Future program. 

Professor Pope holds degrees from SCI-Arc and Princeton, and taught at Yale University and SCI-Arc before coming to Rice. His design work has received numerous awards including national and regional awards by the American Institute of Architects as well as a design citation from Progressive Architecture. He is the recipient of numerous grants from a wide variety of funding agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts and the Shell Center for Sustainability. He is the author of the book-length study of the postwar American City, Ladders, recently reissued in a second edition (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, 2015). Professor Pope has written and lectured extensively on the broad implications of post-war urban development. His current research addresses the urban implications of climate change. He is actively working on the formulation of new models of density in light of the extraordinary demands soon to be placed on the global urban environment.

Nov 7, 2016

Bradley Cantrell is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. Professor Cantrell received his BSLA from the University of Kentucky and his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has held academic appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture where he led the school as graduate coordinator and director. 

Cantrell’s research and teaching focuses on digital film, simulation, and modeling techniques to represent landscape form, process, and phenomenology. His work in digital representation ranges from improving the workflow of digital media in the design process, to providing a methodology for deconstructing landscape through compositing and film editing techniques. His work in media has been recognized through a range of venues and has engaged both public and private clients.

Oct 31, 2016

Episode 009 is a brief and belated introduction about the 'Night White Skies' podcast discussing the shows ambitions and guests going forward.

Oct 17, 2016

Gretchen Bakke is the author of 'The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future'. Gretchen Bakke holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Cultural Anthropology. Her work focuses on the chaos and creativity that emerges during social, cultural, and technological transitions. For the past decade she has been researching and writing about the changing culture of electricity in the United States. In addition to her work on electric power systems she has done research in the Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and in Cuba. She is a former fellow in Wesleyan University’s Science in Society Program, a former Fulbright fellow, and is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University. Born in Portland, Oregon, Bakke lives in Montreal.

Oct 10, 2016

Douglas Pancoast, was featured in New City Magazine's list Design 50: Who Shapes Chicago 2016. New City featured Douglas for his project, The Array of Things, which will be installed in April, 2016. Awarded a $3.1 million grant by the National Science Foundation, the project will create a network of interactive, modular sensor boxes that will be installed around Chicago to collect real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use.  Douglas Pancoast is an Associate Professor, Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects (2002). BArch, 1991, University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design; MArch, 1995, Cranbrook Academy of Art. Exhibitions: National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.; Architectural League of New York; Cranbrook Kingswood Gallery. Publications: Princeton Architectural Press; Oculus; Architecture; The Architectural Review. Awards: Architectural League of New York Young Architects Forum Competition; Charles E. Peterson Prize.

Sep 26, 2016

Peter Lloyd Jones is a hybrid innovator, scientist and academic whose initial discoveries have uncovered fundamental mechanisms in stem cell biology, embryogenesis and human disease, including breast cancer and lung development. Jones’s work actively seeks and finds new solutions to complex problems via extreme collaborations within seemingly unrelated fields, including fashion, industrial, textile and architectural design. Following completion of his Ph.D. at Cambridge University in Genetics and Pathology, Jones conducted post-doctoral fellowships in 3-D Biology with Drs. Mina Bissell and Marlene Rabinovitch at UC Berkeley and The University of Toronto, respectively. Currently, he is the first Associate Dean of Emergent Design and Creative Technologies at The Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University (TJU; Est1825), where in 2013, he founded MEDstudio@JEFF; a research and education space focused on discovering new and dignified solutions in health care using approaches rooted in human-centered design. In 2014, MEDstudio@JEFF partnered with DesignPhiladelphia and Friends of The Philadelphia Rail Park to explore how design could be deployed to benefit heath at an urban scale. Prior to this, Jones was a tenured Associate Professor of Pathology at The University of Pennsylvania, where he established a national center for the study of pulmonary hypertension, and co-founded the Sabin+Jones LabStudio with architectural researcher Jenny E. Sabin, now at Cornell. In addition to 100+ scientific pubs and numerous installations across the globe, Jones’ ideas on contemporary relationships between biology and design have been featured in the catalog accompanying the Gen(H)ome exhibition at the MAK Center in L.A., and in an issue of 306090 dedicated to models. Recently, Jones was elected into National Academy of Inventors. nominated for Scientist of the Year at The Philly Geek Awards, and in 2016 he made his one and onlyTV acting debut as a master-spy on the Emmy award-winning National Geographic science series, Brain Games. Also in 2016, he collaborated once more as curator and designer with Jenny Sabin Studio (which acts as lead design) of THE BEACON for Health and Wellness futures, a responsive ecosystem that probes the interactions that might exist between medicine and design at their outer limits. THE BEACON debuts for 10 days on Oct 06 during DesignPhiladelphia 2016 at Lubert Plaza/TJU in Philadelphia with a focus on reimagining urban health via the future Philadelphia RAIL PARK.

Sep 19, 2016

Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D., Assoc. AIA - is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE and an Associate Professor of Practice at NYU. Formerly, he was an architect at the offices of Frank Gehry and I.M. Pei. He as been awarded a Fulbright grant and fellowships with TED, Moshe Safdie, and Martin Society for Sustainability. He was chosen by Wired magazine for "The Smart List” and selected by Rolling Stone for “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”. Mitchell won many honors including; AIA New York Urban Design Merit Award, 1st Place International Architecture Award, Victor Papanek Social Design Award, Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability, History Channel Infiniti Award for City of the Future, and Time magazine’s Best Invention with MIT Smart Cities Car. He's featured as “The NOW 99” in Dwell magazine and “50 Under 50 Innovators of the 21st Century" by Images Publishers. He co-authored the books, “Super Cells: Building with Biology” and “Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned”. His design work has been exhibited at MoMA and the Venice Biennale. He earned: PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, MArch Columbia University.

 

Sep 12, 2016

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. Ed’s research and teaching explore digital narratives, contemporary culture and the intersection of the humanities, arts and sciences. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, Spring 2017) and the co-editor of Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, Spring 2017) and Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future(William Morrow, September 2014). He completed his PhD in English and American literature at Stanford University in 2011. Before graduate school Ed worked as a journalist at TimeSlate and Popular Science. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2002 with a Comparative Literature major and certificates in Applications of Computing, Creative Writing and European Cultural Studies.

Sep 5, 2016

Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov are Associate Professors at the University of Michigan Tuabman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and founding principals of the design-research practice RVTR. Their work and writing explores the agency of architecture and urban design within the context of dynamic ecological systems, infrastructures, energies, materially and technologically mediated environments, and emerging social organizations. Their body of work in “responsive envelopes” has been developing composite material systems that operate as thick, sensing skins that are integrated with sensing, intelligence, kinetic action, and interaction capabilities. This work has been published in Leonardo, IJAC, JAE, eVolo, [bracket] Goes Soft, and featured in in Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship with Nature by Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer, Paradigms in Computing by David Gerber and Mariana Ibanez, Performative Materials in Architecture by Rashida Ng and Sneha Patel, and High Performance Homes by Franca Trubiano. Most recently, their “Infundibuliforms: Kinetic Tensile Surface Environments” project received a 2016 R+D Awards honorable mention from Architect Magazine. Thün and Velikov also undertake work at the urban scale of infrastructures and territories. They have recently co-authored Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (Park Books, 2015), and were collaborators on EXTRACTION, the Canadian Pavilion exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Aug 29, 2016

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future CoexistenceNothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

Aug 16, 2016

On this innagural podcast, we have Filip Tejchman, who is an architect and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He’s also the principal of Untitled Office. In this episode we talk about his ongoing research called ‘Beyond the Invisible Rainbow’. We discuss the use of energy as a material to build space with and what this means for tools designers use and how this can inform new shapes and forms for design.

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