Why We Build

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.

“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.

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.

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.