Night White Skies

There is probably no bigger name in science fiction in the last 50 years than Kim Stanley Robinson . Robert Markley (who I'm speaking with today) wrote a book with that very title, 'Kim Stanley Robinson' that looks at his work. The book looks at the works including the alternate histories of The Days of Rice and Salt , the future through the Mars Trilogy , as well as books like Shaman that take pl...

What does it mean for architecture to have character? Stewart and Allison are co-founders of Design With Company, who's work is interested in concepts that are shared between architecture and literature, including: narrative fictions, type, and character. The work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award and the Young Architect's Forum Award and has been featured in...

Elena Manferdini, principal of Atelier Manferdini. She currently teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture SCI-Arc where she serves as the Graduate Programs Chair.

Amy writes about arts, culture, and the environment. She is the Deputy Publisher of Guernica magazine and the Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books , where she also writes a monthly column called " Burning Worlds. " It explores how contemporary fiction addresses issues of climate change.  She is also the co-editor of the anthology, House on Fire: Dispatches from a Climate-Changed World, f...

Michael Benedikt is an ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and teaches design studio and architectural theory. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and of Yale University. Although he has practiced at small scale, he is best known for his writings and lectures. Architectur...

This week is a conversation with John May and we're discussing a book he recently wrote called 'Signal, Image, Architecture. It's a short book with an objective to define the playing field today for this discussion. The book makes a clear distinction between that of a drawing, a photograph and an image. And in doing so makes it clear that those first two (drawing and photograph) are not what archi...

Today is a conversation with Holly Jean Buck and we're discussing her book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration.   I think for many of us that like to think we're working in at least the general wheelhouse of climate change, we still don't have a firm grasp of what geoengineering entails. For most of us, it's a singular black box technology that will either help our curren...

James Bradley is an author and critic. His books include the novels, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade , a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus and the Penguin Book of the Ocean and of course most recently Ghost Species.   Today is a conversation with the author and critic James Bradley and we're discussing his recent novel Ghost Species which looks to the implications of the great up...

Today is a conversation with Sylvia Lavin and we're discussing her recent book 'Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects'. Book Sylvia Lavin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Prior to her appointment at Princeton, Lavin was a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she was Chairperson from 1996 to 2006 and...

Natasha Sandmeier's work and research straddles the worlds of architecture and visualization – with a long-standing interest the role of media within the creation and production of speculative architectures and environments. She is an educator and leads the postgraduate Entertainment Studio at UCLA Architecture & Urban Design. She is an architect and founding partner of Studio OUR, and the author...

Just yesterday two astronauts launched into outer space from the United States for the first time in 9 years. Interesting side note, this launch was the first time in 40 years that NASA astronauts launched in a new space craft...The Space Shuttle had been around for over thirty years. Today is a conversation with Jeffrey Nesbit and we're discussing the book 'Extraterrestrial' co edited by himself...

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her research looks at the extended material flows of common construction materials and their social and ecological relations. Recent publications include Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019) as well as an edited volume, Landscript 5: Material Culture...

Larry Busbea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (MIT Press, 2007), The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction  (forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture and the C...

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His work as a designer and researcher is about how we imagine new spaces for future worlds, and about who is invited into them. His first book, Space Settlemen...

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. In addition to his new book Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities, he is the author of  The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and The Work of...

Elisa Iturbe is a critic at the Yale University School of Architecture (YSoA), where she also coordinates the dual-degree program between YSoA and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Her writings have been published in  Log ,  Dearq , and  Pulp , in addition to a forthcoming piece in  Perspecta . Most recently she guest edited  Log  47, titled  Overcoming Carbon Form,  an issue de...

Today is a conversation with Charles Waldheim. Waldheim is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist. Waldheim's research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor at Harvard University's...

Today is a conversation with Jo Lindsay Walton and we're discussing a book called 'Strange Economics' which is edited by David F. Shultz. The book consists of 23 new science fiction pieces written specifically for the book that foreground various types of economic models. Jo is a guest editor of 'Strange Economics' and wrote the afterward for the book. Jo is also co-editor (with Polina Levontin) o...

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition to the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain , Dr. Barrett has published over 200 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science , Nature Neuroscience , and other top journa...

Alexander Eisenschmidt is the author of 'The Good Metropolis, Between Urban Formlessness and Metropolitan Architecture' Birkhauser, 2018 Alexander is a designer, theorist, and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches design studios and courses in history & theory.

Dr. Kiang is a biometeorologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York. She c onducts research on the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere, focusing on life on land.  Dr. Kiang also relates this work to research in astrobiology, particularly with regard to how photosynthetic activity produces signs of life at the global scale and how these may exhibit adaptations t...

Neil Denari is principal of Neil M. Denari Architects / NMDA and a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. With NMDA, Denari works on building projects in North America, Europe and Asia. In 2012, NMDA won first prize in the New Keelung Harbor Service Building competition. Denari lectures worldwide and has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Penn...

This week is with Mark A. Cheetham discussing his book 'Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the 60's' 

This week is with Rachel Armstrong, Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. Rachel Armstrong leads Metabolism research in developing artificial biology systems showing qualities of near-living systems. Armstrong is the author of the books Origamy and Invisible Ecologies.

'The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can't Do'.  Edward Tenner is a distinguished scholar of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University Department of History. His essays and reviews have appeared in  The New York Times ,  The Washington Post ,  The Wall Street Journal ,  The Atlantic ,  The Wilson Quarterly , and F...