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DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Duo Dickinson
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. Hosted by Duo Dickinson, FAIA
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- 3 weeks ago56 min
Words & Creation
7 AM, Saturday, October 3, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgWords 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, ink, photography – and, yes, architecture – to manifest the beauty we discover. Poetry, prose, music are part of the created spectrum of expression that transcends usefulness. We are aware of the tools, but we want to go beyond them to touch the thrill of beauty found in the inscrutable beauty given to us – sky, light, water, living things of all realities: but words have the permanence of construction and the spontaneity of music: as does architecture.There is extreme impact in the realities no architect, poet or artist can create – only reveal. The wind, light, scent, living form and natural movement we are given can transform us. And we can aspire to that transformation.How do words leverage our humanity in expression? On DESIGN NOW poets, writers and an architect (me) walk through the distinctions, connections and power of creation. JOIN US!
- Sep 5, 202655 min
The New Mobocracy of Design
7 AM, Saturday, September 5, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgOur 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 food criticism, “fashion” is on the phone not the next Vogue: we scroll 20 second vids – we no longer wait for Walter Cronkite to define “That’s the way it is.” We still use our buildings, see art, eat food, see the world around us, but for everything beyond our daily encounter, the world has – in a generation – changed from a place where words and pictures on paper were presented to us through writers, editors and institutions into a direct injection of anything in the world via each person’s phone into our perception.We once needed curators to see beyond our daily lives: now everyone each has agency to peek at anything: Without editors will a mobocracy end cultural direction or will it reveal an unfiltered creativity? It is virtually a cliche, but as we fret AI, humanity cis hanging through technology more now than anytime since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. As Kurt Andersen, author, critic, polymath who has spent a lifetime swimming in all the cultural currents in every form of national media says we are in a world of “the decline of Establishment gatekeepers and the rise of extreme democratization, for worse as well as better.”Andersen is joined on DESIGN NOW! by Paul Goldberger, writer, teacher and long time critic of architecture of the New York Times and Martin Pedersen, the co-creator of the Common Edge Collaborative – after nearly 20 years of being the Executive Editor of Metropolis Magazine. We may be out of control, but we may not be out of understanding: LISTEN!
- Aug 1, 202655 min
The Terrifying Necessity of the Hand
7 AM, Saturday, August 1, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgArtificial 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, even think has a bull’s eye on it: A Greater Mind is paralleling every analog reality and instantly transforming it into Artificially Intelligent “information”As long as we have electric power, we are in the Matrix/Borg/Hive of Us: No fingers, eyeballs, ears need apply in the Screen-Centered Life.But even keyboards use fingers: mics hear voices, screens use eyes: We are not Cyber – We are Corporeal. We may create in our minds, but we cannot touch beauty without touch. Creators that live the joy of manifestation, not the validation of of technological Fit. Three brilliant creators are living in the tactile, sensorial, interactive humanity of physical creation in the world that is careening into dehumanization.Technology’s clay feet of distortional dehumanization can be ignored, cursed, or we can just live the gifts we have been given: the senses, feelings, joys of the world we live in; the physical reality Artificial Intelligence tries to distill into data: DESIGN NOW! has three creators who do not chase “cutting edge” but bathe in the Here And Now:On the media they bypass, see the work of their hands, eyes, hearts, minds:The architect Jeremiah Eck writes, teaches and builds buildings: and he dedicates weekly time to devotional paintinghttps://eckmacneelyarchitects.com/jeremiah-eck-paintings/Michael Imber is an architect who swims in living history: but he also devotes days of his weeks to watercoloring lifehttps://www.michaelgimber.com
- Jul 4, 202659 min
A Terrible Time For History
7 AM, Saturday, July 4, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgUrbanist & 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 this last decade, brought to a head by the latest absurd Style shitshow: We, architects, fully dance with gravity, and have no idea how it is made or, really what it is. The only other unchanging, universal, immutable, uncontrollable constant is Time. In humanity we define and try to control that with History. History, to me, is just the other Gravity.The Internet has levelled the perception of the world to a 2D universal connection: defining the inscrutably complex as a Dating App – scroll left to reject/right to accept. Dumbing Down is nothing new, but the conflation of aesthertcs/politics/morality into Good vs. Evil dehumanizes everything we perceive:Architecture is the point of the spear in the rending of culture: conflation of “tradition” into “civic beauty” or “modrnism” into “innovation” demeans everyone, no matter what they love and create.An hour of talk with thoght leaders in history, architecture & journalism: We are living a time in design that presents stark silos of percetion: A history that isn’t. A future that we cannot know. We build both. Architects are terrible with time.
- Jun 6, 202658 min
Why We Build
7 AM, Saturday, June 6, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgWhat 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: hospitals, libraries, prisons, theaters.But what about the places we make to go beyond ourselves?Some creations happen that are not based on their design but in the hope to connect us beyond ourselves. Going beyond architecture into ourselves is not the basis of design Canon, education, tradition. Buildings based in spiritual connection have traditionally been more like theaters than places of intimacy. The icons and rituals of museums and theaters are the tools of humans use to illicit response. That is the essence of tradition.What if what we create listens beyond what we know into what we feel? – To discover what light, space, sound – beauty – reveals rather than what aesthetic recipe conjures?Is there transcendance in design beyond the design and designer?Christianity Today recently brought up the the desire of most religious people for “traditional” places, https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/03/best-church-architecture-new-building-survey/ Other surveys are showing a cultural shift away from “traditional” weekly worship. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-attendance-and-congregational-involvement/ but 2025 has seen an uptick in church attendance.This DESIGN NOW! offers up a conversation on how the 21st century has (or has not) realized an evolution how anyone thinks of spiritual places. Mark Michael is the Editor of The Living Church and has seen hundreds of creations based on faith alone. Ian Douglas is a scholar of theology, was a Bishop in the Episcopal Church and worked with Duo Dickinson to create places that reflected how faith has changed. Miroslav Volk is a world leader in theological though, and has spent over a decade in helping to create Grace Farm in New Canaan – a remarkable invention of a building in the crucible of aesthetics, spirituality and culture.
- May 2, 202655 min
“Style” In Architecture: Cultural Cosplay?
7 AM, Saturday, May 2, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgSince 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 timeless truthes in aesthetics? Is “Classical Architecture” classic? Or is the aesthetic of the old a layer of cosmetics that cloke buildings in a skin of precedent? Is “Modern Architecture” just another superficial wash applied to construction? Do we rationalize the way buildings look to answer to “Progressive” or “Historic” preconceptions, no matter when and how a building is designed, made and participates in a community?What is history in architecture? Is time as constant a force in design as gravity? Or is “style” a convenient justification for arbitrary preferences? Why do we love some buildings and hate others? Art? Music? Why do we make aesthetic Bibles in “Canon” or Recipes of visual components that if “correctly” applied justify our love (or hate) of the buildings we judge? Are we now in a time of the cultural Blanding of architecture? High Modernism and High Classicism are often relegated to those who can afford their great costs in building. Instead the bland boxes all around us are cheap to make and grotesquely expensive to own.Two extraordinary voices who understand time and aesthetics join DESIGN NOW! Elihu Rubin is the Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale. He is a faculty member at Yale School of Architecture. He has written Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape and his current book project is “Ghost Town: The Urban History of an American Icon.” In Fall 2024, Rubin was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. Christopher Wigren is Deputy Director of Preservation Connecticut, where he serves as a central font of understanding and expertise in the way we value history in buildings of all types. He is the author of Connecticut Architecture: Stories of 100 Places (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and serves on the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Review Board and the Merritt Parkway Advisory Committee. Most recently, he coordinated a project with the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office to document the heritage and works of the Olmsted landscape architecture firm in Connecticut.
- Apr 4, 202655 min
Are There “Manifestoes” Anymore?
7 AM, Saturday, April 4, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgWhat 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, Right Now, the Trump Administration has written one – prescribing The Truth in Architecture for all “Civic Architecture” – compelling “Traditional” “Classical” Architecture as the lone legitimate reflection for an entire pluralistic country. Whether it was Albert Speer in Nazi Germany or Guiseppe Terrangni for Mussolini, political power tries to extend to aesthetic determination.Why do we try to herd the cats of creativity? Why are the Commandments of Aesthetic Morality? In the era of AI and the internet are “Manifestos” a Dead Letter?DESIGN NOW! Has some perspectives: including an architect who has written a New Manifesto to be published this year. The author will be with us and those who have a perspective on why we feel compelled to extend judgment to everyone everywhere when we cannot even agree on the most basic values in the world today.
- Mar 25, 202656 min
QUA CLADDING?
7 AM, Saturday, March 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgWe 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 (above, left) or conventional midrises (right), facades are now canvases for the shallowest of decoration. While most single-family homes are still wrapped in stock siding in imitation of old-timey shingles and clapboards, these new facades have one critical difference: the rejection of past precedent.The agent of this change is a new generation of siding materials: “cladding,” “rain screens,” “ventilating facades,” and the newest versions of paint: “acrylic/urethane/silicone/elastomeric” coatings. Architects can’t avoid the relentless, full-court press from product manufacturers, and this new exterior window-dressing now extends to the wide use of “exterior cladding consultants,” who shoulder the liability of the architect’s ignorance of these products.Joining us on DESIGN NOW are architect, writer and historian Mark Hewitt, architect, professor and maker Lindsay Suter, and architect Jay Brotman of FCA architects, formerly known as Svigals and Partners in New Haven: who create beauty while others make what we see all around us,
About DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions
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. Hosted by Duo Dickinson, FAIA
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