DESIGN NOW: Cultural Collisions

7 AM, Saturday, November 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgHumans create – it’s just just who we are. We design things – buildings, fine art, food, clothing and, yes music. Architecture is often seen as a direct parallel to music in creation. The cliche is “architecture is frozen music” said by writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. also famously referred to music as “liquid architecture” – building with mathematical ratios, proportion, rhythm, harmony, repetition, and texture to evoke human emotion and shape space.Befire that, in 27 BC, Vitruvius Pollio (Roman Architect and writer) wrote in book 1 of The Ten Books on Architecture (De Architectura) about the importance of Music (Classical Music) for the education of an Architect. He stated that understanding music is necessary to creating buildings. Today writer Theodora Ozien Iboi in Medium states that: ‘Architecture is Frozen Music’ because it uses the medium of buildings to communicate. Good architecture embeds symphonic elements which evoke powerful emotional responses in humans and makes them feel they have some control over their environment.This connection is not often tackled head on, Two guests, world renouned architect Barry Svigals has also lived a life with another architect performing music. Composer, performer, musician Istvan B’rac has created music that is directly conspired with design. We play selections of creation of both and talk about how design and music are in cogenesis and complementary in outcome.

7 AM, Saturday, October 3, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgWords and design are part of our humanity: Poetry is to Prose what Beauty is to Building. Architects like me aspire to create Beauty, but we must make buildings first. Words are necessary for both prose and poetry, but poetry goes beyond the meaning of words.How words are used to create has the same elemental utility as any media – paint, clay, ink, photography – and, yes, architecture – to manifest the beauty we discover. Poetry, prose, music are part of the created spectrum of expression that transcends usefulness. We are aware of the tools, but we want to go beyond them to touch the thrill of beauty found in the inscrutable beauty given to us – sky, light, water, living things of all realities: but words have the permanence of construction and the spontaneity of music: as does architecture.There is extreme impact in the realities no architect, poet or artist can create – only reveal. The wind, light, scent, living form and natural movement we are given can transform us. And we can aspire to that transformation.How do words leverage our humanity in expression? On DESIGN NOW poets, writers and an architect (me) walk through the distinctions, connections and power of creation. JOIN US!

7 AM, Saturday, September 5, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgOur mirrors have changed. We are living the reversal of two centuries of criticism and journalism. It is a time of the loss of commentators, critics, or writers. There are 3 – maybe 5 – full-time, dedicated national architecture critics left in America from over twenty a generation ago. But architecture is not alone. Yelp has similarly fired food criticism, “fashion” is on the phone not the next Vogue: we scroll 20 second vids – we no longer wait for Walter Cronkite to define  “That’s the way it is.” We still use our buildings, see art, eat food, see the world around us, but for everything beyond our daily encounter, the world has – in a generation – changed from a place where words and pictures on paper were presented to us through  writers, editors and institutions into a direct injection of anything in the world via each person’s phone into our perception.We once needed curators to see beyond our daily lives: now everyone each has agency to peek at anything: Without editors will a mobocracy end cultural direction or will it reveal an unfiltered creativity? It is virtually a cliche, but as we fret AI, humanity cis hanging through technology more now than anytime since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. As Kurt Andersen, author, critic, polymath who has spent a lifetime swimming in all the cultural currents in every form of national media says we are in a world of “the decline of Establishment gatekeepers and the rise of extreme democratization, for worse as well as better.”Andersen is joined on DESIGN NOW! by Paul Goldberger, writer, teacher and long time critic of architecture of the New York Times and Martin Pedersen, the co-creator of the Common Edge Collaborative – after nearly 20 years of being the Executive Editor of Metropolis Magazine. We may be out of control, but we may not be out of understanding: LISTEN!

7 AM, Saturday, August 1, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgArtificial Intelligence is the latest Kill Shot to our Analog Humanity. We let the electrons do the walking (and thinking) as we scroll through the Black Hole of perception. First computer digitization made drawings electricity, without dimensional media. The Internet then suffocated the hand-to-heart-thru-mind of writing. Now, all we hear, see, even think has a bull’s eye on it: A Greater Mind is paralleling every analog reality and instantly transforming it into Artificially Intelligent “information”As long as we have electric power, we are in the Matrix/Borg/Hive of Us: No fingers, eyeballs, ears need apply in the Screen-Centered Life.But even keyboards use fingers: mics hear voices, screens use eyes: We are not Cyber – We are Corporeal. We may create in our minds, but we cannot touch beauty without touch. Creators that live the joy of manifestation, not the validation of of technological Fit. Three brilliant creators are living in the tactile, sensorial, interactive humanity of physical creation in the world that is careening into dehumanization.Technology’s clay feet of distortional dehumanization can be ignored, cursed, or we can just live the gifts we have been given: the senses, feelings, joys of the world we live in; the physical reality Artificial Intelligence tries to distill into data: DESIGN NOW! has three creators who do not chase “cutting edge” but bathe in the Here And Now:On the media they bypass, see the work of their hands, eyes, hearts, minds:The architect Jeremiah Eck writes, teaches and builds buildings: and he dedicates weekly time to devotional paintinghttps://eckmacneelyarchitects.com/jeremiah-eck-paintings/Michael Imber is an architect who swims in living history: but he also devotes days of his weeks to watercoloring lifehttps://www.michaelgimber.com

7 AM, Saturday, July 4, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.orgUrbanist & 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.