Home Page Radio

HOME PAGE becomes DESIGN NOW!

12 NOON, Wednesday, September 17, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org After nine years (!) HOME PAGE RADIO at WPKN changes: this unique focus on the role of homes in our in our lives with live sharing of insights, becomes 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. DESIGN NOW! will debut on Saturday, October 4, 7AM! What will Artificial Intelligence mean to those dedicating their lives to innovative creation? How will the internet change how we judge design beyond the instant superficial reactions of our meme-based/swipe left-right judgment? Our perception of design is now instant and universal: and that immediate meaning is becoming directly associated with our politics: to what end? How does technology redefine art? What buildings are dead structures standing: awaiting abandonment? Guests from HOME PAGE’s 9 years join us to comment on the home’s legacy – and what DESIGN NOW! can address.

HOME Destination

12 NOON, Wednesday, August 20, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Homes are universal – we all need a safe place to rest our head and be away from the world. But just as people are diverse, homes are too. And some of those people capture our imagination. For architects and designers homes are often seen as the Essential Building: manifesting the most elemental, fundamental aspects of structure and building. But our culture often focuses on those we find fascinating: with Starchitects those persona find embodiment in their homes, but more, the artist, the rich, the idiosyncratic all all homes and the cultural focus on them as celebrities is transferred directly to their homes. Since Fallingwater 50 years ago “Tourist Destination” architecture has included homes. In Connecticut we have Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Mark Twain’s own home in Hartford. Why do these homes embody our hopes beyond their structures and have cultural and personal importance to so many? Why do we want to go to see these homes? Why are they worth so much attention – what does that focus reveal about what our homes mean to us? Great guests associated with these terrific places join us!

The HOME of Housing

12 NOON, Wednesday, July 16, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org It is extremely expensive to have a place to live near New York City – even in southern New England and Long Island. In the first half of the 20th century, the single family home basis of freestanding homes simply sprouted out of fallow farm lands – each on their own plot of land. After World War 2 whole neighborhoods suburbia took that fallow farmland and made instant “Bedroom Communities” before there was any land regulation now known as “Zoning”. That explosive change was facilitated by commuter trains, refrigerated food transportation and the Federal Highway System – but that change also facilitated the birth of Zoning Laws. In most suburban communities Zoning Codes were designed to protect the value of the homes that were already built by insuring that the pattern of single family homes on individual building lots was mandated and the size and nature of new development served to perpetuate the suburban patterning that these communities were based on. But this low density, car-dependent culture isolated commercial and civil facilities into designated town centers and made home ownership financially impossible for lower income families. As costs exploded in the last generations and the environmental effects of low-density living became known, there is a desire to change the reasoning behind Zoning from protecting and projecting existing communities – despite the extreme (and growing) problems of affordability for more and more people in America. Connecticut and other governments have tried to facilitate, even require, the ability of our communities to adapt to this affordability crisis by revising the Zoning laws created to perpetuate the status quo: In Connecticut this means state bills that direct the more that 150 towns and cities that have in-place laws and processes that regulate land use. The latest version of that revamping of state Zoning requirements was passed by the Legislature, and vetoed by Governor Lamont after many of those towns and cities plead their case for maintaining the existing systems their communities use now. When zoning changes (and it will) how will houses change? How will communities change? Will there be new ways of living together be facilitated by land use regulations? Second homes on existing single family home sites (Accessory Dwelling Units), income regulated multifamily housing new construction, co-housing, unrelated people living together as a family are all being executed now: but what are the ways a new generation of houses will create the housing we need to change the prohibitive costs?

A HOME With No AC?

12 NOON, Wednesday, June 18, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org Its getting warm. Soon HOT. As the world warms, now (and more in the future) we can either add to that heat by creating more carbon to generate electricity to create the air conditioning we need to be comfortable in our homes, or we can use less AC. Changing buildings can be technological, but it can also just be turning off the technology. But comfort and safety from the elements is why we have buildings. And buildings are why we have designers. HOME Page has some of the best architects from some of the hottest places in America to offer up how any place can use its design to use air conditioning less. Beyond eliminating the carbon creation of AC, electrical costs are soaring as we transition to more electrical generation that uses less carbon – so using the “Off” switch daves more and more money, too. We have lived in a home without air conditioning for over 40 years: shade, wind, orientation can be used to design a home that uses less technology, not use more technology to use less carbon. Great voices of reason in a sea of hype and marketing!

HOME: different?

12 NOON, Wednesday May 21, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org We are used to thinking that homes are just buildings: but are they different in the way we design them? Gaston Bachelard, in the 1958 book The Poetics of Space, wrote, “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house. I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Before he built his idyl, Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about his friend’s home, “I that found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love or retirement, simplicity, etc.,” then proceeded to erect his own. Nothing has changed since Thoreau, Bachelard, and Pollan. But every human wants the place they hope for and feel they need. Because our homes are a mirror of who we are. So we try to make ourselves in our homes. When designers are part of that creation, the intimacies of those we design with could be seen as part of “just doing business.”  Those unchanging shared intimacies of hope and fear and faith of home creation go beyond the transactions of most other things in our lives. Unlike the episodic encounter with a chef or a fashion designer, the continuity of an architect’s incorporation into the lives of our clients is more akin to a psychotherapist, one who knows both the origin story and the life evolution of those who bond with each other to make a home. But like a priest or rabbi, the designer sees more than the individual. The spiritual expression of faith in the future a home embodies is a gift given to us. Either by design or circumstance, we make our houses. When architects help birth them, the places we make often outlive us and the histories of what we make. In the rough-and-tumble world of construction that beauty can be forgotten, but it’s why we and our clients are alive. Architects who have designed many types of buildings but have focused on homes join us! Please join me and Architects Robert Orr of New Haven and John DeForest of Seattle!