Home Page Radio

12 NOON, Wednesday, September 17, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org After nine years (!) HOME PAGE RADIO at WPKN changes: this unique focus on the role of homes in our in our lives with live sharing of insights, becomes a forum for exploring design in our culture – not just its role in our lives now, but focusing on the radical changes that are happening. DESIGN NOW! will debut on Saturday, October 4, 7A...

12 NOON, Wednesday, August 20, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Homes are universal – we all need a safe place to rest our head and be away from the world. But just as people are diverse, homes are too. And some of those people capture our imagination. For architects and designers homes are often seen as the Essential Building: manifesting the most elemental, fundamental aspects of structure and buildin...

12 NOON, Wednesday, July 16, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org It is extremely expensive to have a place to live near New York City – even in southern New England and Long Island. In the first half of the 20th century, the single family home basis of freestanding homes simply sprouted out of fallow farm lands – each on their own plot of land. After World War 2 whole neighborhoods suburbia took that fallo...

12 NOON, Wednesday, June 18, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Its getting warm. Soon HOT. As the world warms, now (and more in the future) we can either add to that heat by creating more carbon to generate electricity to create the air conditioning we need to be comfortable in our homes, or we can use less AC. Changing buildings can be technological, but it can also just be turning off the technology. B...

12 NOON, Wednesday May 21, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org We are used to thinking that homes are just buildings: but are they different in the way we design them? Gaston Bachelard, in the 1958 book The Poetics of Space, wrote, “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house. I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”...

LIVE! NOON! WEDNESDAY APRIL 16: WPKN 89.5fm Streaming wpkn.org In a strange housing market, the zeitgeist of the moment is depression. High interest rates, low supply, insane prices make anywhere around a city bizarrely inaccessible. This means building is harder, too. But some persist: Why? Why would you have the courage to risk so much time and money in such a market? Well, the home is at the co...

LIVE! NOON! Wednesday, March 19 WPKN 89.5fm STREAMING wpkn.org We all live somewhere. Our homes are as fundamental as our clothing, our food, just living. In the cultural shake-out of the 21st century, organized religion in America has taken a hit in membership, attendance, and relevance – but that change has been accompanied by the statistical revelation that over 80% of us are “spiritual” – with...

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Censorship comes in many forms. We censor ourselves at family gatherings on politics. We cannot say prohibited words on WPKN radio shows. We even try to limit what can be taught, read at a library, or spoken about in public forums. For the second time in four years, the Federal Government will try to censor what it builds. The first time t...

Wednesday, January 15, 2025 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org We are in a time of change: climate, society, politics, technology: and buildings always adapt: but in the instant exposure of the Internet, is there anything “new” in how we conceive of buildings and architecture?  Rather than performance (resilience, sustainability, energy efficiency) is there a different way building design approaches ho...

Wednesday, December 18, 2024 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org The year is about to end. We are past COVID and the election. We are way beyond the awe of seeing our first Smart Phone, let alone the thrill of posting meaningless internet fodder. The advent of the 21st Century is old news. It is not yet the new year, new presidency, or anywhere near knowing how our culture will connect post lingering an...

Wednesday November 20, 2024 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Everyone has a place to live, but here in Connecticut and Long Island the costs of our places to live are extreme – so extreme that the culture around us is inundated with Real Estate Media: House sales and market rate rentals are now part of our daily media diet. What about the huge number of us who simply cannot afford the homes shown in...

Wednesday October 16, 2024, 12 Noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org A century of top-down architectural determination is over. Regimes of conferring worth via station and prestige have been replaced with the number of “likes” and “followers” accruing as if the entire world is one polling station. We have reached intellectual democratization, where popularity trumps insights (good or bad) – our world is...