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 a…

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 pi…

The Unfrozen squad descends on Venice to experience inperson the full blunt force of the Biennale. Special guests include: Carlo Ratti, the curator of the 19th Architecture Biennale, Anastasia Sukhoroslova, CEO of All Things Urban, and Michele Champagne, graphic artist and contributor to Volume magazine. -- Intro/Outro: “Bounder of Adventure” by Th…

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 he…

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 Skywa…

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 demystif…

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 dow…

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 …

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. Cal…

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 dist…

“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 obsta…

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 Unf…

“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…

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 techn…

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…

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: "…

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 …

Scott Francisco is the founder and director of Pilot Projects, a systems thinking and design consultancy that co-creates sustainable solutions to complex challenges in global systems, cities and the natural environment. On this episode of Unfrozen, we discuss the Cities4Forests initiative, which aims to more closely align the environmental and econ…

Tucked away in a hollow some 20 miles south of Atlanta, theTown of Trilith contains multitudes: possibly North America’s largest purpose-built film and television production studio, a steak/cigar bar, bucolic surrounds, “loft”-style living and cornhole games on an ersatz main street – everything, surely, somebody would want out of a hometown. But w…

Over the past 20 years, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani has taken the question, “what, and who is the city for?” directly to the streets of Prospect Heights in Brooklyn and Mosswood in Oakland, asking locals to take her to the places that matter to them. A visual urbanist, co-founder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada, and widely exhibited photograph…

Between, and sometimes within, the boundaries of nation-states are thousands of liminal zones which are neither here nor there, and their rules are different from those of the countries in which they are physically located. Author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian calls this “The Hidden Globe,” and chronicles the in-between places where money, art, luxurygo…

Amidst the unprecedented destruction wrought by the multiple fires that swept across Southern California in January 2025, there are opportunities, and causes for optimism that we can build back, better than before. Among these is the prospective role of prefabricated construction,which can be 30 to 50 percent faster than traditional methods. Steve …

The inauguration of the 47th president of the United States takes place on January 20. What are the implications of Trump 2.0 on the built environment, design and cities? Inspired by the eponymous, omnibus crucible of dread in the New York Review of Architecture, we huddled with the best and brightest design critics we know, Kate Wagner (The Nation…

Dan and Greg recap Unfrozen in 2024 and look ahead to 2025. -- Show Notes: Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform,” by The Cooper Vane - Our Spotify Wrapped Stats for 2024 - AndrewAndrew - That time in 2005 when Greg wrote that podcasts wouldnever amount to anything. If you find it, send us the link! --- TOP EPISODES OF 2024: - Top episode of 2024 …

Mankind’s quest for verticality has an underexplored dimension:the queasy feeling of vertigo many experience when close to the edge of a sheer drop. Davide Deriu, Reader in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Westminster, London, has taken on the relative lack of research into the subject with an interdisciplinary approach, captur…

Dan and Greg recap the highs and lows of the first full year of Unfrozen – 33 episodes – and look ahead to 2023. Did you know? You don’t have to catch the stars as they fall. You can listen to any episode from our web site, or on your favorite podcast platform, at any time! Intro/Outro: “Our Lips are Sealed,” by The Go-Go’s Discussed: - A high numb…

Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Blair Kamin has long informed and delighted readers with his illuminating commentary. Kamin’s newest collection, Who Is the City For?, does more than gather fifty-five of his most notable Chicago Tribune columns from the past decade: it pairs his words with striking new images by photographer and architect…

Cities that produce only underwear, blue jeans and extras in domestic films are among the fascinating objects of study in Typological Drift: Emerging Cities in China by Shiqiao Li and Esther Lorenz. Journey with Unfrozen and Shiqiao Li to reveal the surprising urban realities of China that escape normative urban theories, with several stops along t…

Michael Eliason is an architect and founder of Larch Lab, a studio focused on prefabricated, decarbonized, climate-adaptive, low-energy buildings and livable ecodistricts. Eliason, based in Seattle, had a transformative experience while living in Germany – the American residential model could be greatly improved by adopting some of the principles o…

Hanif Kara is a civil and structural engineer and professor in practice at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the co-founder of AKT II, a 350-person engineering practice based in London. The firm won the Stirling Award for Peckham Library in 2000 (with (Will Alsop), the Sainsbury Laboratory in 2012 (with Stanton Williams), and the B…

Unfrozen interviews Peter Wynne Rees, Professor of Places and City Planning, The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, who was previously City Planning Officer for the City of London, from 1985 to 2014. He is a founding member and director (1990-2022) of the British Council for Offices and received their President’s Award in 2003 …

Patrick MacLeamy was the CEO of HOK from 2003 to 2017, capping off a 50-year career at the venerable firm responsible for the National Air and Space Museum, Moscone Center, and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, and is credited with creating "The MacLeamy Curve," a touchstone of business guidance for the built environment. In his semi-retirem…

Daniel Kaven is the author of Architecture of Normal: The Colonization of the American Landscape, a book that views the built environment through the lens of successive developments in transportation. An architect and visual artist hailing from Albuquerque, now calling Portland home, Kaven takes on suburbanization, flying cars, and why “Generation …

Chicago is a famed architecture town, but the road has not always been smooth. Hear from the editor and author, respectively, of two recently released guides – Laurie Petersen for the AIA Guide to Chicago and Vladimir Belogolovskyfor the DOM Architectural Guide Chicago, discourse on Postmodernist icons like the Thompson (future Google?) Center and …

Dan’s recent consecration of the world’s tallest timber building; Greg’s new gigs, and hotels to stay at while making them happen; the third space in a post-COVID world; update on the Durbin Renewal scandal in Chicago, and a preview of upcoming guests. Intro/Outro: Super Sex by Morphine Tall Timber: Ascent, Milwaukee Rocket & Tigerli, Winterthur, S…

Marina Otero, head of the Social Design Masters Program at Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands, is the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design's 2022 Wheelwright Prize. Her study, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, will examine new architecture paradigms for storing data, and how reimagining digital infrastructures could…

Think of Tokyo less as a “chaotic” than as an “emergent” city. This means spontaneous, self-organizing aspects create order from the bottom up. That kind of emergence can be, if not designed, then facilitated. Unfrozen interviews Jorge Almazan, Associate Professor, Department of System Design Engineering, Keio University, and author of “Emergent To…

For a truly philosophical take on the role of the architect in the post-truth era, Unfrozen interviews Richard Francis-Jones, author of Truth and Lies in Architecture. Intro: “Telling Lies,” by David Bowie Discussed: Architecture’s ambiguous relationship to truth. The criteria that make a building worthy of love. How can architecture bring us close…

Unfrozen interviews Stefan Al, author, Supertall, founder, Stefan Al Architects, designer of Canton Tower, Guangzhou with Information Based Architecture (IBA). Intro/Outro: “History Rhymes,” by Empty City Squares Discussed: Technology: The role of technologies: concrete, elevators, air conditioning and dampers Society: Culture, social preferences, …

Greg reports from Houston, where he and Richard Florida had some stage-sharing to do. Dan recounts a jaunt to the Canadian Riviera and Pacific Northwest, where mass timber is on the rise. Then on to demolitions, what’s on the bookshelf, future guests, future guesses…. -- -- Intro: “Livin’ on the Edge (of Houston),” by Reverend Horton Heat Discussed…

Meet Changsub Lee, a 14-year-old in South Korea who has been designing skyscrapers since he was eight. He's already a celebrity in the tall building world. Ivy League schools of architecture, prepare yourselves now. The recording is a bit soft, but if you crank him up, he's got a lot to say. Intro/Outro: "Skyscrapers," by OKGO Discussed: New Songdo…

Two toy visions of Los Angeles describe two very different future visions: One vision wants you to play with its toys – and would be offended if you didn’t – the other most assuredly does not. It is strictly off-limits, and is meant to be admired from a distance. One says “don’t touch;” the other practically grabs your hand and pulls you into the g…

Original story: Unfrozen 1.0, Sept. 3, 2012 A profile of two metallic sculptures by two design firms in Los Angeles: "A Loose Horizon," by LAYER, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and "Bloom," by DO|SU, at Materials & Applications. Intro / Outro: "Metal Machine Music," by Lou ReedBy Daniel Safarik and Greg Lindsay

Dan and Greg interview Matt Nardella, founder of Moss Design, a Chicago design-build firm with an array of residential and commercial projects, and a bent for nudging clients and neighbors toward sustainability in small, but meaningful increments. Interviewee: Matt Nardella Intro / Outro: “Highway Chile”, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience Discussed: -…

Building on the momentum of Episode 21, this special episode is a back-to-back Rees attack, with Greg and Dan both relaying their respective reports from the City of London’s raconteur-in-chief, from 2017 and 2013, respectively. Intro: "In the Engine Room," by Mike Watt The Engine Room Intermission: "Talk Talk," by Talk Talk The City and Color Comm…

Greg, fresh from a trip to London, shares with Dan updates and reminiscences of the hale old town in the throes of ever-later capitalism, doffing hats to its raconteur-in-chief, Peter Wynne Rees. -- Intro: “Hairdresser on Fire,” by Morrissey Discussed: Peter Wynne Rees The Square Mile (City of London) Skygarden shitshow at the Walkie Talkie – 20 Fe…

Designers, urbanists, public policy advocates, and any others are who would join the Urban Technology Program at the University of Michigan are “hopeful monsters” & “strange creatures.” Meet their leader. Guest: Bryan Boyer, Director, Urban Technology Program, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan // Co-founder,…

Brutalism has had a rough time over the past decade. Can it be redeemed before it’s too late? Originally published in The Faster Times on October 8, 2012 and on Unfrozen 1.0 on November 22, 2012. - Intro: “Creep,” by Radiohead - A Teardown? o [“Alma Matters,” by Morrissey] - Truthiness be Told - Brutalism is the Prog-Rock of Architecture o [“2112 –…

Silicon Valley prides itself on "innovation" and "disruption," and its products are meant to drive "sharing" and "collaboration," but the architecture it builds can be stunningly conservative and insular. From the Unfrozen 1.0 post, May 28, 2013 -- Intro: “I Know Where the Summer Goes,” by Belle and Sebastian Too Much, the Magic Bus [“Magic Bus,” b…

Greg and Dan, back at it again, talking about Olympics architecture and urbanism, the Housing Crisis 2.0, and the greatest hits from the 60s, 70s and 80s, come back to life as Zombie Capitalism. -- Intro: "Games Without Frontiers," by Peter Gabriel Outro: "Paper Money," by Montrose Discussed: · Beijing Olympics 2008 and 2022 games looking very diff…