DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions

7 AM, Saturday, October 3, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Words and design are part of our humanity: Poetry is to Prose what Beauty is to Building. Architects like me aspire to create Beauty, but we must make buildings first. Words are necessary for both prose and poetry, but poetry goes beyond the meaning of words. How words are used to create has the same elemental utility as any media – paint, clay...

7 AM, Saturday, September 5, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Our mirrors have changed. We are living the reversal of two centuries of criticism and journalism. It is a time of the loss of commentators, critics, or writers. There are 3 – maybe 5 – full-time, dedicated national architecture critics left in America from over twenty a generation ago. But architecture is not alone. Yelp has similarly fired...

7 AM, Saturday, August 1, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Artificial Intelligence is the latest Kill Shot to our Analog Humanity. We let the electrons do the walking (and thinking) as we scroll through the Black Hole of perception. First computer digitization made drawings electricity, without dimensional media. The Internet then suffocated the hand-to-heart-thru-mind of writing. Now, all we hear, see,...

7 AM, Saturday, July 4, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Urbanist & Thought Leader Andres Duany, Historian & Architect Mark Alan Hewitt and Critic & Editor Martin Pedersen in an hour of intense interaction in a fraught time. Whether it’s the 250th Anniversary Arch or the Obama Center, we have lost a sense of time and meaning beyond polemic in design.  Actually, it’s an evolving reality in th...

7 AM, Saturday, June 6, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org What are aesthetics without profit, transaction and personality? We create buildings to accommodate our desires. They are harbors first, inspirations second. All around us, we see new buildings built for profit: housing, stores, offices. We also build homes and institutions to glorify those building them. There are purpose-built constructions, too...

7 AM, Saturday, May 2, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Since Profit tore down McKim Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station in New York City more than 60 years ago, the “Historic Preservation” aesthetic mission has saved thousands of irreplacible buildings, and created a whole rationale of the future being in the past. Now the value of history has been co-opted in political aesthetics. Are there timele...

7 AM, Saturday, April 4, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org What is a “Manifesto”? The Declaration of Independence is one. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses another, but in art and architecture it is a “thing” to define “beauty” in writing, as Law, as “Canon.” Corbusier wrote “Vers Une Architecture” 100 years ago, I even helped create one 15 years ago for the now moribund Congress of Residential Architecture. Now...

7 AM, Saturday, March 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org We live with the outsides of everyone else’s buildings. The bulk and size is often what we notice most, but what materials are used: their color, contrast, or banality is impossible to avoid: and exteriors have changed over the last generation because materials have changed… Have you noticed them? Whether it’s stick-frame-over-podium buildings (a...

7 AM, Saturday, February 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Everyone of us are directly confronted the fact of sacred space – it’s encounter, appreciation, even creation. Some places are more than accommodation: and many of those spaces are not “religious” by design. Designers labor to create Sacred Space, but we are often moved beyond coherent understanding by places that touch us. The natural, the ex...

7 AM, Saturday, January 3, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org There is political urgency in the Housing Crisis: There is academic fascination with Urban Design: There is popular cultural obsession with Community Building. But the basic directions of how we make places to live together have often been based on road layout, zoning codes and the vision of those who are either “planners”, ‘designers”, real es...

7 AM, Saturday, December 6, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Every President leaves a mark on the White House. Truman’s Balcony. Jackie’s Rose Garden. FDR’s East Wing. Design is how humans mark their homes. But some of us, a few, feel entitled to ignore where we are, deny who was before us, simply do what we want. The present national administration has access to money, and no time for intellectual curi...

7 AM, Saturday, November 1, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org The house is the “Ur” building – the most essential architecture: it is the one place that every human has, and knows. The design of a place to live can be a room’s color or a palace. Homes are the extensions of humans – and if designed by a designer the process has a product that has intimate meaning to its occupant: And the home is often the...

FIRST SHOW! 7AM, Saturday, October 4, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Time is as undeniable as gravity. Design is as human as history. Creators are as idiosyncratic as any aspect of humanity. Looking back, revelling in the moment and chanelling the future are just who we are. Design is also what humans do, too: so time is an essential frame in design perspective. How is the inevitable change of living...