DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions

Duo Dickinson
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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

Episodes

  1. Jul 4

    A Terrible Time For History

    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 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.

  2. Jun 6

    Why We Build

    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: 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.

  3. May 2

    “Style” In Architecture: Cultural Cosplay?

    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 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.

  4. Apr 4

    Are There “Manifestoes” Anymore?

    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, 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.

  5. Mar 25

    QUA CLADDING?

    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 (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,

  6. Feb 8

    FINDING THE SACRED

    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 experienced, the discovered are all around us. For designers it is too easy to use icons, rituals or culture to define what is designated “spiritual”: – but where do YOU find sacred place? DESIGN NOW! Brings in people who have found themselves living lives that find and live in sacred space: in religion, in life, in our humanity.

  7. Jan 3

    DESIGN: VISIONING COMMUNITY

    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 estate developers, politicians or activists: all trying to capture a cultural vision: but how do any of those think of outcomes? The framing of our social aesthetics is so complicated in realization that its easy to lose the essential vision of why some of us want to design a future – versus simply accept cultural evolution without design: What do we value? What do we want? Do we encourage? discourage? prohibit? require? Beyond pretty 2D renders and site plans- what do those thinking about our collective future see as our future living together? Three world thought leaders in how we form community join DESIGN NOW. Sarah Bronin is an architect, educator and spearheaded a huge revision in Connecticut’s State Zoning Regulations. Yodan Rofe is an Israeli professor and urban design authority, Andres Duany is an architect and urban designer and was one of the creators of New Urbanism, and has participated in the creation of over 300 communities.

  8. 12/06/2025

    FINDING GOLD IN THE WHITE HOUSE

    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 curiosity, and so has abandoned perspective: to the point where “STYLE” has replaced perspective. Finding substance in affect is compensation for a lack of understanding. Absent that understanding aesthetic triggers are applied by a monied Presidency to evoke “Traditional” – rendering that “STYLE” as a gloss of veneer that drenches fully non-traditional, in fact grotesque, acting out. In these extreme acts of hubris Design is not aesthetic but a weapon. The mechanisms of cultural communication are abandoned in raging declarations: Gold is applied everywhere. The landscape plowed under. Flagpoles and giant boxes of building are surrounding the now quaint 19th century icon. Dialogue with anyone save the President to and with himself renders designers to be cyphering shills that enact tantrums of expression. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts was the public side of conversations about aesthetics in public design – including the White House https://www.newhavenindependent.org/2025/10/29/trump-boots-becker-from-arts-panel/ . Bruce Becker, architect, entrepreneur, and sustainability thought leader was fired from it by the administration that they would have ignored the Commission anyway. But the firing of volunteers to silence them, despite their having no power, is as violent as all the raged damage done to the meek White House. Kurt Andersen understands American culture with a sweeping depth and breadth reflected in his writings, talks and public voice revealing the absurdities of today’s political and cultural chaos. He has been both critic and novelist, writing widely, including for the New York Times, Newsweek, New York Magazine and frequent appearances on scores of media platforms. Martin Pedersen is a co-founder of the Common Edge Collaborative: a forum for the voices often absent from the usual suspects in design commentary: His work as Managing Editor at Metropolis Magazine connected him to the essence of what makes design integral in our culture. He is a founderv of the Podcast “Our Buildings, Our Selves” along the DESIGN NOW host Duo Dickinson. We will talk on DESIGN NOW about the cultural synergy that no longer exists in our politics and, now, in public design.

  9. 11/01/2025

    DESIGN & THE HOUSE

    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 most public face of a person or family. Most “Design” is judged by the public as finished objects, most often seen in 2D and judged by their aesthetic impact: but the home is lived by those living in it: the proof of worth is in the experience of living in a home: its social value or cost is not the primary determinate of its worth. Homes are often our largest set of clothing, where fit trumps style. Homes are completely subjective in their expression, and yet a universal building every person has. Home design is a risky adventure where trust and faith weave with fear together, testing wallets, schedules, and all the ways building anything meshes with our culture. Most home construction in most places does not require “professionals”, but some states do. (In Connecticut no home under 5,000 square feet in size has to have a licensed architect.) None of the manifestation of who we are in our interior surfaces requires a licensed designer – especially in the era of Internet availability of everything. What do homes mean to their designers? How do they connect to the owners? How do the designers create their own home? Renowned architects Mark Simon, Jeremiah Eck and George Ranalli have designed both homes and public buildings: their insights on the way design changes to fit the use is essential to understanding the channels of creation every designer addresses.

  10. 10/29/2025

    DESIGN: CHANGE

    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 in time reflected in design and the arts? DESIGN NOW! has three guests that are living lives that address time in design: Michael Morand is a fixture at Yale’s Beinecke Library, a temple to the written word and the official Historian of the City of New Haven. Peter Newman is immersed in the creative life as a film and television producer, actor, and part of the architecture world. Last is Aurora Perreault Assoc. AIA, who was awarded one of AIACT’s “Emerging Professional” Awards for 2025, she has just started a career in design with a perspective on how the future looks by someone who will live it. Living history, action and hope is just who we are: how are creatives changed by all the changes of time? HOME PAGE Radio’s 9 years draws to a close and becomes a fantastic set of Podcasts https://feeds.transistor.fm/home-page-radio and live radio becomes a composed recorded program, DESIGN NOW! with instantaneous portable podcasts – JOIN US for the only program of its kind in the region, if not all of radio!

  • 10 Episodes

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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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