In this episode we hear from the group of American academic architects that has been brought together by this issue of attention. The group pushes back against their characterization as a generation, though there are throughlines in the group— namely their responses to the digital project, the crash of 2008, and their individual, pluralized approaches to architecture.
Download“I wonder about the idea of generationality in general and whether or not people of my age, of my generation of people generally sort of see work generationally in those terms. And I guess I’m not sure that I necessarily do.”
“We’re not the 1960s genre of trying to kill your father. I think we continue to look up to one another and support each other.”
“I think one of the things that distinguishes us is hyperpluralism. Even within our very very niche tiny thing that the world of architecture doesn’t care about, which is experimental academic architecture.”
“Everyone, I think, wants to be an individual. I think this is all kind of maybe not necessarily talked about in a very open way, but everyone wants to be an individual, while also making their own art of architecture.”
“One thing that you might also associate with that group of people including ourselves, is the time that they entered academia was roughly in that kind of like 2008, 2009, 2010 post economic crash.”
“What I notice is, let’s say the faculty that went to school when going to college cost not $50,000 a year. And the ones that did.”
“This is a generation of practices that are coming to a certain point during the pandemic, racial reckoning, and imminent climatic disaster. I know amongst my own colleagues here at Michigan, and I think elsewhere as well, I think that we’re all feeling that we are in the middle of the most epic paradigm shift in the discipline in decades.”
Interviewer
Joseph Bedford
Producer and Editor
Tim Cox
Writers
Joseph Bedford and Tim Cox
Narrator
Tim Cox
Interviewees
Curtis Roth, Andrew Holder, Michael Meredith, David Eskenazi, Michael Young, Kyle Reynolds, Kyle Miller, Hans Tursack, Katie Macdonald, Kyle Schumann, Jaffer Kolb, Kelly Bair and Kristy Balliet, Bryony Roberts, Meredith Miller, Anna Neimark, Neyran Turan, Michelle Chang, Ashley Bigham, Erik Herrmann, Jerome Haferd, Clark Thenhaus, Paul Preissner, Stewart Hicks, Brittany Utting, Daniel Jacobs, Mira Henry, Matthew Au, Jimenez Lai, McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, Andrew Kovacs, and Jon Lott.
Senior Editor
Joseph Bedford
Music
Background music Dreamsphere 1 by Sascha Ende has been used under CC BY 4.0.