Unfrozen

Jesse M. Keenan is the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at Tulane University. In his upcoming book North: The Future of Post-Climate America , he outlines the complexities of America’s handling of climate change and its effects on not only migration, mitigation, and real estate, but also our institut...

Just in time for Halloween comes a spooky story of speculation and specters in the world of real estate. Joshua Comaroff, a professor at National University of Singapore, is the author of Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore . He tells Unfrozen that, despite being one of the most assertively modern nations in the world, mysticism and geomancy are very much part of the design and c...

Depending on how you look at it, it is either a great or rough time out there for speculative fiction, as reality continues to bite at the heels of even the most dystopian visions. Jason Tester is a futurist with a knack for telling prescient stories about our imminent urban realities, in a startlingly graphic way. The visually compelling Insurrection: an American Future predicted troop deployment...

Rem Koolhaas is nothing if not enigmatic, which makes him and his first major built work, the Villa dal’Alva, Paris (1990), an ideal first subject of the “Gumshoe” series of architectural mysteries. Cutting through the conventions of academic jargon and trade press, The House of Dr. Koolhaas reopens the “cold case” of Koolhaas and examines evidence in a pulp-detective novel format. Unfrozen turns...

Dismayed by the destruction and death in Gaza? Fear not, the wizards at Boston Consulting Group have a plan – a 38-slide deck that will Make Gaza GREAT Again. It’s a molten nugget of consultant-speak, SimCity planning moves, weirdly proportioned AI slop renderings, and tokenized real estate transactions that place a thin veil of “solutioneering” over what looks an awful lot like ethnic cleansing....

A former president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Carl Elefante has led the field in finding common ground between two things seemingly in conflict: sustainable design and historic preservation. He is a Principal Emeritus with Quinn Evans and a charter member of the Climate Heritage Network . In addition to his work on the intersection of historic preservation and sustainability, h...

Hillary Brown , Professor Emerita of Architecture at the City College of New York, joins Unfrozen to discuss her book Revitalize | Resettle , which explores how climate migration and rural revitalization can solve interlinked crises. Brown emphasizes that large U.S. cities alone cannot absorb climate-displaced populations due to infrastructural limits and rising costs. Instead, she proposes strate...

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 and photographed the new book from Rizzoli, The Wri...

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 picked a pontiff, we had our own mini-conclav...

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 The Cooper Vane

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 hears his unique perspective as both critic and exh...

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 Skyway ·        Houston...

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 demystify the why and wherefore of what you can, cannot,...

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 down their nosesat retail, the essential lubricant o...

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 remain so controversial. Join the Unfrozen interv...

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. Call it dystopian, call it optimistic. Just don...

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 distinctly American icons. Catch the in-person book t...

“Either you’re growing your materials or not. You’re gettingthem from a forest or a mine.” Lindsey Wikstrom is the Founding Principal of Mattaforma and 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 obstacles to wide adoption of mass timber as a build...

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 Unfrozen. -- Intro/Outro: “I Still Wear the Uniform,...

“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, urban design, and traffic engineering. Paralle...

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 technologists of America’s 40 largest architecturefirm...

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 factors, including global warming, sea-level rise...

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: "I Still Wear the Uniform," by The Cooper Vane --...

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 The Cooper Vane Show Notes: - The "Joy" Thing wi...

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 economic goals of cities and the forested lands on wh...