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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: 2018
Dec 17, 2018

Today we discuss Chris's writings about augmented reality and cartography. Chris is a public servant within Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland Directorate, Northern Ireland Civil Service as well as a guest writer for San Francisco based Venture Beat.

 

Nov 12, 2018

Today is a conversation with Chris Pak who is a scholar of speculative literature. His research interests are in the ecological and environmental significance of stories of terraforming and pantropy , which is to say the modification of other planets and the modification of bodies to enable the habitation of otherwise uninhabitable environments. His book (which we’ll be discussing today) is from Liverpool University Press called, Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. The book focuses on terraforming and its link to climate change and geoengineering, global politics and the relationship between the sciences, philosophy and the arts.

Oct 29, 2018

Astrophysicist Adam Frank is a leading expert on the final stages of evolution for stars like the sun, and his computational research group at the University of Rochester has developed advanced supercomputer tools for studying how stars form and how they die. His most recent book is 'Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth'.

Oct 22, 2018

Muchaneta Kap-fundee is founding editor-in-chief of FashNerd.com, which she co founded with Mano ten Napel in 2015. Fashnerd is one of the fastest growing digital magazines writing about fashion technology and wearables. www.Fashnerd.com

Oct 8, 2018

Today is a conversation with Ian Bogost. Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic.

We discussed privacy, machine learning, cows, and buying twizzlers.

Oct 1, 2018

This week is with Paola Antonelli - MoMA's Senior Curator of Architecture & Design + Director of R&D. We’re discussing her new show ‘Broken Nature’ for the upcoming XXII Triennale di Milano. www.brokennature.org

Sep 24, 2018

Kiel Moe is a practicing architect and Sheff Professor of Architecture at McGill University, and author of 8 books. We’re discussing his most recent book Empire, State and Building. The book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan – the parcel of land under the Empire State Building – over the past two hundred years.

Sep 17, 2018

This week is a conversation with architects Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy about 'Geostories - Another Architecture for the Environment'.

Jul 23, 2018

This week is a conversation with the architect Filip Tejchman about the recent book by Michael Pollan 'How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence'.

 

Jun 25, 2018

Rob DeSalle is curator at the American Museum of Natural History & author of 'Our Senses, An Immersive Experience'.

Jun 10, 2018

Today is a conversation with Bryan Norwood who recently guest edited Log 42 (winter/spring 2018) entitled “Disorienting Phenomenology.” Bryan Norwood is completing his PhD at Harvard University in the History and Theory of Architecture. 

For more visit www.seanlally.net

Jun 3, 2018

This episode is a conversation about the work of the author Ursula Le Guin with Sing Yun Lee and Francis Gene-Rowe (both members of The London Science Fiction Research Community) 

May 21, 2018

This week is a conversation with philosopher Graham Harman. We talk about his introduction of Object Oriented Ontology (or OOO) and it’s potential influence on the discipline of architecture.

(photo credit: SciArc)

May 14, 2018

Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett, UCL, London & author of the article “Post-Digital “Quitters”: Why the Shift Toward Collage Is Worrying”. 

His latest monograph is, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence, has just been published by the MIT Press.

May 7, 2018

I’m happy to say that today’s guests are two friends - architects Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno of Future Cities Lab. Future Cities Lab is an experimental art and Design studio in Francisco, CA.

Since 2005, founders Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno have collaborated on a range of cutting-edge projects exploring the intersections of art and design with public space, performance, advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, and responsive building systems.

 

Apr 23, 2018

This week I’m talking with Chris Thomas, professor of conservation biology at the University of York in the UK and author of the recent book ‘Inheritors of the Earth, How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction’. His numerous articles and academic works make him one of the world’s most influential ecologists, and his research has been covered on the front pages of the Guardian and Washington Post. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012, received Marsh Awards for Climate Change Research in 2011 and for Conservation Biology in 2004, and was awarded the prestigious British Ecological Society President’s Medal in 2001.

Apr 16, 2018

This week is a conversation with chemist and author Kathryn Harkup about her book ‘Making the Monster, The Science behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’. Kathryn completed a doctorate on her favorite chemicals, phosphines, and went on to further postdoctoral research before realizing that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed a bit more that hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. She currently writes a monthly poison blog for the Guardian and gives regular public talks on the disgusting and dangerous side of science. Kathryn’s first book was the international best-seller ‘A is for Arsenic’, which was shortlisted for a Mystery Readers International Macavity Award and a BMA Book Award.

Apr 9, 2018

This week on Night White Skies is a ‘Topical Interlude’ - A fictional conversation between myself a Larry Page of Google and a look at NYC’s Central Park in 2034.

Apr 2, 2018

This episode is a conversation with architectural designer and theorist Christopher Hight about two science fiction books;'The Drowned World' by J. G. Ballard, and 'Seveneves' by Neal Stephenson. The two books were published over 50 years apart. Both of these books are prime candidates for this show because they each do two things. The two books discuss an evolving Earth climate as well as an evolving human species. There is also quit a bit of difference within these two books. We see very different reasons for the climate change that’s taking place, the plotlines occur over drastically different time scales, and the ‘how’ and ‘what’ that occurs to human evolution is different. The two books also open a conversation about how designers and architects can rethink the concept of resilience regarding the environment.

Mar 26, 2018

It’s a great article about the work of NASA and others putting humans in space. To put people in space, you have to create environments for them to live. In the early 1970’s NASA created big plans for new space colonies for human to live in. But what kind of nature would we be bringing up to space? If the same nature that we know of down here on earth doesn’t have to abide by the same rules of light, soil, atmosphere and gravity up there in space, how might it be different And therefore how might that shape us as humans. How might this change our own perspectives and relationships to nature back here on Earth.

Mar 12, 2018

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 120 articles and chapters and is author or editor of more than 15 books, including The Fifth BranchScience at the BarDesigns on Nature, and The Ethics of Invention. Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies. She founded and directs the STS Program at Harvard; previously, she was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell. She has held distinguished visiting appointments at leading universities in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the US. Jasanoff served on the AAAS Board of Directors and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the University of Ghent Sarton Chair, an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria, and membership in the Royal Danish Academy. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente.

Feb 26, 2018

Bradford Bouley is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a fellow at the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. His research focuses on the histories of religion and science in the early modern, especially Italian, context. His first book, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2017. His work has also appeared in Catholic Historical Review, the Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo. He is currently writing a second book entitled The Barberini Butchers: Meat, Murder and Warfare in Early Modern Italy, which will discuss food supply, warfare, and some early episodes in environmental history.

Feb 19, 2018

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of architecture, design, and artificial intelligence. She is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture and how it poured the foundation for contemporary digital design. Molly is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, with a courtesy appointment in the School of Architecture. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, adjunct faculty at Art Center in Pasadena, CA, and an associate professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. Molly cut her teeth on the web in 1994 and has since worked with groundbreaking studios, consultancies, and corporations. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and an M.E.D from the Yale School of Architecture.

Feb 12, 2018

Christopher Schaberg received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature and critical theory. At Loyola, Dr. Schaberg teaches courses on contemporary literature and nonfiction, cultural studies, and environmental theory. He also teaches a first-year seminar on airports in American literature and culture. He is the author of three books on airports: The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), and Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017). He has co-edited two essay collections: Deconstructing Brad Pitt (2014, with Robert Bennett) and Airplane Reading (2016, with Mark Yakich). He is currently completing a book called The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth, which is about teaching, reading, and writing in the early twenty-first century. Dr. Schaberg is founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of an essay and book series called Object Lessons which explores the hidden lives of ordinary things. This series offers hands-on opportunities for Loyola students who are interested in nonfiction writing as well as working in editing and publishing.

Feb 6, 2018

Liam Young is an Australian born architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is founder of the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. Building his design fictions from the realities of present, Young also co-runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBCNBCWiredGuardianTime Magazine, and Dazed and Confused and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has taught internationally including the Architectural Association and Princeton University and now runs an M.A. in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc. Young manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.

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