Welcome to the second episode of Our Buildings, Our Selves: Humanity in Architecture, a monthly podcast produced by Common Edge, the Connecticut Architecture Foundation, the Connecticut AIA, and Bridgeport public radio station WPKN.    

All specializations create their own language, rules, and personalities that reinforce the values of those engaged in that particular work. Architecture is no different. For a century, the profession celebrated its “great chefs”: Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaus, Zaha Hadid…all personified Architecture with a capital “A.” But architecture, and the culture around it, is changing, and now there are fewer cults of personality. What happened? We’ve evolved from a top-down curated world of editors and tastemakers, focused largely on the “stars” of the profession—often creating them by their own coverage—to a more bottom-up, nearly instantaneous feedback loop. Messier and fractured, no doubt,  but perhaps more democratic. This month we talk with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic, and design critic and creator of the popular blog McMansion Hell, Kate Wagner.

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for the New York Times and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway, a small team of Times journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He’s the author of Intimate City: Walking New York. Michael has written about climate change, public housing and homelessness, public space, landscape architecture, community development and equity, infrastructure, and urban design. 

Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist based in Chicago and Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is the creator of McMansion Hell, which roasts the world’s ugliest houses. Since its launch in July 2016, the blog has been featured in a wide range of publications, including the Huffington Post, Slate, Business Insider and Paper Magazine. Kate has written for Curbed, 99 Percent Invisible, The Atlantic, Architectural Digest, and more. She is currently the architecture critic for The Nation and teaches at the University of Chicago.

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The April episode of Our Buildings, Our Selves will explore how the internet has completely transformed the way the profession is covered. Our guests will be Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger and Chicago-based design writer Zach Mortice. Future episodes will explore architecture and the internet, the explosion of AI, and our national housing crisis.