We are excited to announce the launch of a new monthly podcast, Our Buildings, Our Selves: Humanity in Architecture, produced by Common Edge, the Connecticut Architecture Foundation, the Connecticut AIA, and Bridgeport public radio station WPKN. We will talk with some of the most thoughtful voices in architecture, design, and culture in an accessible way that reaches beyond the cloistered debates that architects often have with each other. 

Our first episode, linked at the bottom of this introductory post, asks the rather blunt question: What is ugly? Much is made in architecture circles about the unending quest for “beauty,” but every reality in the world causes immediate reactions, whether delight or disdain (and everything in between). Endless projections of what creates the beautiful in our lives are offered up by architects and designers, and now even by our government. But in architecture, how do we define its opposite? What is “ugly”? To help us explore these ideas, we talk to renowned writer and educator Witold Rybcynzski, best-selling author of A Clearing in the Distance and countless other books, and writer and cultural critic Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America. 

Rybczynski studied architecture at McGill University, in Montreal, where he also taught for 20 years. He is Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. Rybczynski has designed and built houses as a registered architect, as well as doing practical experiments in low-cost housing, which took him to Mexico, Central America, Nigeria, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, and China. He has written for the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, and has been architecture critic for Saturday Night, Wigwag, and Slate.

Andersen is the author of the bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh, he co-created the streaming series COMMAND Z (2023). He co-founded Spy magazine and co-created and hosted the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. He’s also a journalist and a regular contributor to the New York Times and The Atlantic, formerly a New Yorker columnist, Time design critic and columnist, and New York magazine editor-in-chief.

For Spotify users, listen in HERE.

For Apple users, listen in HERE.

Future episodes of Our Buildings, Ourselves will explore “The End of the Starchitect: What’s Next?,” “Architecture & the Internet,” and the “Emergence of AI.” Guests will include Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of the New York Times, Kate Wagner, creator of the popular architecture blog McMansion Hell, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and Chicago-based design writer Zach Mortice.