Thursday, April 26, 2018, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org
Host: Duo Dickinson
Why are homes definitively human? Why are we so obsessed with them, abstractly, personally, visually? Homes are a huge money focus: Almost a million new homes are built in the US every year now, even after the Great Recession. We have 80,000,000 of them in America, and HOUZZ, DIY TV, and unending media foci reflect our common obsessive interest in homes.
Homes may be the most powerful projection of architectural value. Because shelter is essential for all of us, the home is architecture’s universal function. We’re all experts on what our own home must be, to us. The universal reality of a home, the one place that everyone needs and knows, offers up value for architects, and it has nothing to do with style. There are extreme variations found in how homes are presented, from the most cynical pandering of homebuilder marketing, to the lazy thoughtless style-branding by realtors, to the dismissive prejudice of most academic or “serious” architects who discount “vernacular” (i.e. not modernist) homes.
Guests:
Alan Organschi – a international leader in residential design as both an architect and an artisan. Along with Elizabeth Gray, Alan is design principal and partner at Gray Organschi Architecture in New Haven, a firm recognized nationally for its residential, institutional, and infrastructural design. Alan is also a leader of the Jim Vlock Buildng Project at Yale. He is also the principal of JIG Design Build, an offshoot of his work at Gray Organschi Architecture that specializes in the prototyping, fabrication, and installation of building components and systems. Organschi and Gray and were honored in 2012 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for their design of the Fairfield Jesuit Center. He is a contributing author and editorial board member of the book Mitigating Climate Change: The Emerging Face of Modern Cities. His ongoing research explores the use of new wood technologies in mid-rise, high-density housing and infrastructure.
Sarah Susanka, who created the outrageously successful “Not So Big House” series of books, and ultimately the “Not So Big Life” extension of architectural theory into life outlook. After graduating from the University of Oregon, settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She pursued a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Minnesota while working for several architecture firms. Her thesis was the basis of her “Not So Big” books.[1] She was a founding partner of SALA Architects before leaving to pursue her writing and speaking career full-time. Her company is Susanka Studios. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Charlie Rose Show, and NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, and her philosophies have appeared in various publications such as USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Susanka was dubbed “one of 18 innovators in American culture” by U.S. News and World Report in 1998. In 2004 Builder Magazine ranked her as No. 14 out of 50 “Power Brokers”. In 2007, she received the Anne Morrow Lindbergh Award,
John Connell is a life-long designer of homes and teacher of how you can create one. John graduated from Yale’s School of Art & Architecture, and has dedicated his life to the expression of residential obsessin in his own crat, but more importantly into thousands of lives by his educational outreach and personal presence in defining home design to the world. John is Vermont’s Yestermorrow School’s founder and, according to them, their “most active dilettante.” John is focused on green, modular housing strategies to promote residential Architecture at reasonable cost. An author (Homing Instinct, Creating the Inspired House) and frustrated animator, Joihn has been a leader in hiome design for decades, and has co-founded or launched the Congress on Residential Architecture (CORA), the Custom Residential Architects Network (CRAN) and Forever Young Treehouses.
