DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.