Mixed Signal Podcast

OpenAI is bankrolling architecture's biggest competition — $120,000+ in prizes behind the CartesianForms brief, designed to be inherited in 2030, altered in 2055, and passed on in 2080. Plus the bubble tea: Matt Seybold's case that university endowments are tangled up in private equity's AI bet. Then, at Pratt, Caleb talks with Alex Tahinos — co-curator of "The Unbearable Heavines...

AI isn’t making designers faster — it’s making everyone else a designer. A new AI-in-design industry report says product managers and engineers are doing design work now, and a randomized Figma Make trial put numbers on it. Then: Apple Music’s new logo was made by sound, Apple finally puts a touchscreen on the MacBook Pro, Teenage Engineering opens its first store in SoHo, Princeton names historia...

This week: a quiet masterpiece at The Met by Young and Ayata, a hit documentary about concrete (plus the indie-film wave around it), Tesla's Roadster and the great car-person debate, a licensure rant over Lebbeus Woods, and Kyle Miller's living map of the discipline.

Milan-based designer Hazem Talaat — known as Hazem the Architect — trained as an architect in Egypt and Italy, then walked away from the discipline to build a multidisciplinary art-direction career spanning album covers for Griselda's Conway the Machine, creative consulting for Rick Owens, set design, and the Venice Biennale. In this first Season 3 MXD Signal interview special, he talks with W...

The EU wants you to label your AI renders — and Caleb is not having it. "Get your hands off my images." This week: why a rule aimed at consumer fraud lands hardest on the small studios and students who finally got professional-grade imagery, whether the Neom era is really over (the money didn't disappear — it moved to data centers), and the hot take that Gehry's houses beat his m...

We open with a striking construction stat: data centers are drawing around $725 billion in capital while home building and factory construction decline. We talk about what that means for architects and students entering the job market, whether “I won’t build data centers” is a meaningful ethical line, and why so much capital is now flowing into buildings almost nobody will experience. Then we get...

This week we start with a heavier topic: newly updated Google Earth satellite imagery exposing the scale of destruction in Gaza, paired with on-the-ground photos of a makeshift football pitch built where the main stadium once stood. We talk about the role images play in making distant devastation real, the practice of forensic architecture, and how communities rebuild function and daily life amid...

This week we start with the viral Lexus x MSCHF collaboration — two "twisted" concept cars that spark a bigger conversation about car-deformation art history, brand collaborations, and whether corporate partnerships can still produce legitimate fine art. Then we dig into the escalating saga of Trump's DC Arch, which has evolved from a monument concept into a proposed military complex...

This week we open with the University of Chicago pulling laptops and phones from its core social science classrooms — and New York City banning AI in elementary and middle schools. Is going analog the right call, or are blanket tech bans just fear of an unknown future? We get into how we handle it in our own studios and seminars. Then: the US Space Force unveiled new uniforms, and the sci-fi refer...

This week we get our first real look inside MAD Architects' long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, opening September 22nd in LA after a wild history that started in Chicago. We compare the polished press photos to the more candid, "banal" behind-the-scenes shots making the rounds — and talk about what actually happens when hype meets reality on a capital-A architecture project....

We start with the shakeup happening across higher education — starting with The New School's mass faculty cuts and what it says about the future of architecture and design programs everywhere. We talk tenure, underenrolled humanities departments, and why architecture school recruitment is struggling. Then we shift to AI: the Hugging Face "rogue agent" incident that's got security experts calling i...

What stories do architects tell themselves—and how do those stories shape the work they create? This week on Mixed Signals, the MXD crew is joined by Kristen Mimms Scavnicky and Adrienne Economos-Miller, educators, artists, and designers whose work explores the powerful relationship between narrative, identity, and representation in architecture. We begin with a round of Cold Crits featuring stude...

The MXD crew welcomes Dr. Rebecca McConnell to the podcast! We discuss the evolving role of the rendering in Architecture in light of new Artificial Intelligence image generation techniques. We then move into a special edition of Cold Crits, featuring speculative Architectural projects from Artist Ismail Seleit. We then discuss some of the differences between education and Academia in the United S...

The MXD crew talks with Gary Polk (BIG, Penn, Pratt) to break down the boundaries of Architectural representation and drawing. We start by diving into previous year's Archisource' Drawing of the Year Competition finalists—debating the line between a "drawing of architecture" vs. an "architectural drawing"—and discuss why standard diagrams might be ruining the discipline...

The MXD crew welcomes Ryosuke Imaeda to discuss models, materiality, craft, and mysterious architectural objects! We start off the episode with a model-focused edition of Cold-Crits. Ryo tells the MXD crew about his time at global design firms Zaha Hadid Architects and Reiser Umemoto Reiser. We also discuss his design-research through teaching and his perspective on materiality and craft in the pr...

The MXD crew welcomes Brendan Ho from Kent State University's College of Architecture and Environmental Design to the studio. We talk about the artist formerly known as Kanye West (Ye), his impactful and controversial career, his stunning SoFi stage design, and his April Fools / possibly real bid to redesign the West wing of the White House? Matt springs a story on us of his IRL run in with Ka...

The MXD crew is joined by Casey Rehm, Coordinator of the Masters of Science in Architectural Intelligence program at SciArc (Southern California Institute of Architecture). He is an expert in computation and a specialist in Artificial Intelligence and specifically a leader in speculation on its impact on Architecture. He is the perfect person to help us catch up on the state of AI and its impact o...

Joined by Architect and educator Andy Bako, the MXD crew unpack the controversy surrounding the accessibility failures of the Hunter’s Point Library by Steven Holl—and the shocking lawsuit that it has resulted in. Is this a failure of ADA compliance, or a deeper failure of spatial design and architectural thinking? And how does something like this happen at the highest level of practice? We also t...

The MXD crew dives deep into the World-making, Architecture, and game design of the viral Bungie video game Marathon with special guest Joseph Cross, art director behind the game’s bold and polarizing visual identity. We explore how Marathon’s aesthetic—what Cross calls “graphic realism”—blends architecture, product design, branding, and visual culture into a unified world. From construction-site...

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative join Mixed Signals to unpack a design approach that refuses to sit in one camp. From line-based experiments to volumetric assemblies, their work navigates between digital and physical, drawing and making, theory and play. Rather than choosing a singular architectural identity, they argue for operating across multiple “camps”—a position that refra...

OMA’s new museum expansion becomes the focal point of this episode of Mixed Signals —not just as a project, but as a case study in how architecture is judged today. The crew unpacks the building’s spatial ambitions, formal logic, and urban presence before confronting a viral critique claiming that “OMA can’t detail.” What follows is a layered discussion on authorship, construction quality, and the...

In this episode of Mixed Signals, the crew is joined by Cathal Crumley for a wide-ranging conversation about the life of the "Online Architect", the rise of meme-based criticism, digital culture, and how architectural ideas are being communicated through new platforms. The episode moves from the “seven wonders of cyberspace” and virtual memory in games like Animal Crossing and Call of Duty: Warzon...

In this episode of Mixed Signals, we debate architecture school culture, spring break studio work, and the strange world of contemporary design competitions. From exceptional student models at UDK Berlin and UPenn Weitzman to the rise of “Eco-blob” and the "Urban Pile" climate architecture, we ask what today’s projects are really proposing—and whether any of them could become a true world wonder....

This week we unpack the NOMA/NOMAS Barbara G. Laurie Student Design Competition to debates about realism, anti-renders, architectural photography, and why certain images of cities feel more truthful than polished architectural visuals. The MXD crew unpacks student competition work, community-centered design, architectural representation, and the tension between formal design discourse and real-wor...

Some architecture projects have nothing to do with buildings. What happens when architecture moves into film, video games, and speculative world-building? In this episode of Mixed Signals, the MXD crew are joined by Liam Young (Director of the Fiction and Entertainment program at SCI-Arc) and Nate Hume (recently appointed Graduate and Post-Graduate chair at SCI-Arc) to discuss how architecture is...