Unfrozen Daniel Safarik and Greg Lindsay

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 talk on July 18 and the exhibition from May 31 to August 26 at the Chicago Architecture Center.

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Intro/Outro: “High Rise” by Ladytron

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Discussed:

MultiStories: 55 Antique Skyscrapers and the Business Tycoons Who Built Them

The DJI Air 2S Drone

Highrises Art Deco: 100 Spectacular Skyscrapers from the Roaring ‘20s to the Great Depression

Henry W. Oliver Building, Pittsburgh, D.H. Burnham, 1910

Nebraska State Capitol, Lincoln, Bertram Goodhue, 1932

Public Market > Modern Spirits Liquor Store, Tulsa, Gaylord Noftsger, 1930

Monadnock Building, Chicago, Burnham & Root, Holabird & Roche, 1891-1893

Eastern Columbia Building, Los Angeles, Claud Beelman, 1930

Mather Tower > Club Quarters Hotel, Chicago, Herbert Riddle, 1928

Union & Peoples National Bank > Jackson County Tower, Jackson, MI, Albert Kahn, 1929

Frick Building, Pittsburgh, D.H. Burnham, 1902

The Woolworth Building, New York, Cass Gilbert, 1913

Price Tower, Bartlesville, OK, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1956

Sterick Building, Memphis, Wyatt C Hendrick & Co, 1930

Industrial Trust Building, Providence, George Frederick Hall, Walker & Gillette, 1927

Guardian Building, Detroit, Donaldson & Meier; Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, 1929

Fisher Building, Detroit, Albert Kahn Associates; Graven & Mayger, 1928

Carbide & Carbon Building, Chicago, Burnham Brothers, 1929

Foshay Tower, Minneapolis, Hooper & Janusch; Magney & Tusler, 1929

Rand Tower, Minneapolis, Holabird & Root, 1929

Kansas City Power & Light Building, Kansas City, Hoit, Price & Barnes, 1931

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’t call it “anthroporn.”

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Intro/Outro: “Until the End of the World,” by U2

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Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, by Timothy Morton

Utopias (and Utopia’s Evil Twins)

                  Welwyn Garden City

                  Chandigarh

                  Burning Man

                  EPCOT

                  Pruitt-Igoe

                  Walmart
Supercenter

Machines:

Bulldozers + polymetric nodules

Fish farms

Solar arrays

Sand motor + littoral drift

Tree-planting drones

Monsters:

                  Geo-engineering

The World Park Project / UN Convention on Biological Diversity

Y2Y

Banff Wildlife Crossings Project

The Atlas for the End of the World

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 interview with Barr, in which some record-breaking myths get busted.

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Intro/Outro: “Altitude Blues,” by Ladytron

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Discussed:

Mythbusting the Home Insurance Building

First Skyscrapers | Skyscraper Firsts Forum

LeRoy Buffington’s skyscraper patent

Mythbusting The Skyscraper Index

The Line

Jeddah Tower

Joel Garreau’s Edge City

Emaar’s real estate play at Burj Khalifa: Downtown Dubai

Legends Tower, Oklahoma City

Empire State Building

China’s “build it” economy

“Zero Gravity Living”

Nashville and Oracle

Detroit and Dan Gilbert

Newark renaissance

Center City District (Philadelphia) study: Downtowns
Rebound

Karen Seto
(Yale)'s studies on tall building height canopies

Kevin Kelley, a self-described “attention architect,” is a
co-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 noses
at retail, the essential lubricant of urban life, and start designing places that matter.

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Intro/Outro: “Friction,” by Television

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Discussed:

Bass Pro Shops at the Memphis Pyramid

Against 15-Minute Delivery

“The Bonfire Effect,” courtesy Loxahatchie, Florida

Participation mystique, as per Jung, as per Lucien Levy-Bruhl

“TheAnxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt

“Harvard Guide to Shopping” by Rem Koolhaas et. al.

Prior Unfrozen commentary on the replacement for the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph

Robert Venturi on Las Vegas

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Yaromir Steiner and Easton Town Center, Columbus

Victor Gruen

Country Club Plaza, Kansas City

The Grove, Los Angeles

The Farmer’s Market, Los Angeles

Larchmont, Los Angeles

Hollywood and Highland (now Ovation), Los Angeles

Harley-Davidson dealerships’ Parts Bar

Mercado Gonzalez, Costa Mesa, CA

Craig Hutson has worked in research and development in academia and industry and is fascinated with the history of Chicago’s lakefront. When seeking a definitive book about the history of Illinois Center and Lakeshore East, the air-rights developments above former docklands and railyards east of the Loop, he realized there wasn’t one, and he decided to write it himself.

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Intro/Outro: “Nighttime in the Switching Yard,” by Warren
Zevon

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Discussed:

Illinois Central Railroad

Illinois Center

Lakeshore East

Millennium Park

Maggie Daley Park

Aqua

St. Regis Chicago

Outer Drive East (400 East Randolph)

Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower

The Park at Lakeshore East

Millennium Station

Hyatt Regency Chicago

Chicago Pedway

Boulevard East

Magellan Development Group

James Loewenberg

Blobs. Doppelgangers. Giants. Puppets. Incontinent objects.
Mullets. Army of Darkness. All and much more are covered in Horror
in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition by Joshua Comaroff
and Ong Ker-Shing.
The book examines how horror genre tropes familiar from books and cinema also
appear in architecture, and in so doing, how we can find another way to
understand and criticize our built environment, using the language of mass culture
in place of “weaponized jargon.” Comaroff is the guest of honor on episode 76
of Unfrozen.

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Intro/Outro: “Scare Me,” by Deadbolt

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Discussed:

 

Immanuel
Kant

Edmund
Burke

Harvard Graduate
School of Design under Rem Koolhaas

Bigness, or
the Problem of Large, by Rem Koolhaas

Centre
Pompidou = Terry Gilliam’s Brazil

Xintiandi,
Shanghai

Jan Gehl

The Architectural
Uncanny, by Anthony Vidler

Built
Beautiful, with narration by … Martha Stewart

Mullets

Army of
Darkness

Twins
are in

Doppelgangers

Ordos
100, Inner Mongolia

-             
House House, by
Johnston Marklee

-             
Gaston Bachelard

-             
Preston
Scott Cohen

-             
Ai
Weiwei

H.R. Giger
-> Zaha Hadid -> Thomas Heatherwick->
Santiago Calatrava

Zeitz
MOCAA, Cape Town

Gordon
Matta-Clark

Jan
Kaplicky / Future Systems

Frank
Gehry

Francois
Roche

Parc
de la Villette

American
Psycho

Hannover
Pavilion at Expo 2000 by MVRDV = Arby’s Breakfast Sandwich

Toshiko
Mori

Caltrans
Building, Los Angeles, Morphosis

Daniel
Libeskind

League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, by Alan Moore

House
of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski

The Master and
Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Saddam Hussein’s Frank Frazetta-esque fantasy
interior paintings

Idi Amin’s
Chinese Garden

Great Basilica,
Yamoussukro, Ivory Coast (110% the size of St. Peters)

Anti-Oedipus,
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The
Day of the Beast and Philip Johnson’s Gate of Europe, Madrid