Now that a native New Yorker real estate agent is our president-elect, cities finally have the pro-urbanism voice in the White House they need! Right? NO EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE. How terrible? We ask Chicago urban policy ace Daniel Kay Hertz (@danielkayhertz) to explain how far the toilet we've flushed. Special thanks to recording engineer Tim Joyce.
For A Lot You Got to Holler’s first-ever live podcast, we shined a light on the most hidden and obscured element of urbanism that’s changing how we interact with cities in every way: data. Invisible streams of 1’s and 0’s pour out of our transit systems, buildings, and utility infrastructure, and into our smartphones, giving us a more dynamic look at what’s happening in our environment second-by-second.
Hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman are joined by Chicago’s own data czar, John Tolva, former City of Chicago Chief Technology Officer and President of Postive Energy Practice, on his last night in town before he moves to Denver with his family. With a crowd of design-lovers at The Chicago Design Museum, Tolva gives his pitch for why we need sensors clipped onto Divvy bikes, and why the snowplow tracker is the city’s most popular website, all before he absconds to the Rockies in a U-Haul full of Chicago’s data! Sponsored by The Chicago Design Museum and MAS Context. Special thanks to recording engineer Tim Joyce.
The A Lot You Got to Holler Cavalcade of Firsts continues, when co-hosts Zach Mortice and Ben Schulman sit down with Ernie Wong of Site Design Group--the show's first ever landscape architect guest! On the agenda: shared streets in Uptown, Chicago's many, many basket-case ruins and slag pits, and an oft-overlooked question: Is shutting down the Dan Ryan and setting prairie grasses in its median on fire a good idea, or the greatest idea? The answer will shock you! Special thanks to recording engineer Tim Joyce.
Architecture is concert halls, museums, theaters, and all of our temples of high culture. But it's also train stations, sewer drains, and the seemingly anonymous infrastructure that makes the city work. Few architects understand how to elevate this everyday machinery of urbanism as well as Chicago's own Carol Ross Barney. She chats with Newcity design editor Ben Schulman and architectural journalist Zach Mortice about the Chicago Riverwalk, the 606, the CTA, and the future of Chicago. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce. Please rate and review us on iTunes!
The neighborhood of Pullman on Chicago's far South Side is a crucible of architectural, labor, industrial, and civil rights history. It's also a national monument, with big plans for renovation and redevelopment on the horizon. Commissioned by railroad magnate George Pullman in 1880 and designed by Solon Beman, Pullman was an idyllic workers utopia. . . for a few years, until a strike sparked what became the modern labor movement. Pullman and his architect looked to design and city planning to raise his bottom line and banish labor unrest from his company. It didn't work, but the result is one of Chicago's most singular neighborhoods.
On hand to talk hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman through the next chapter of Pullman's history is Mike Shymanski, President of the Historic Pullman Foundation, and Richard Wilson, City Design Director for Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and project lead for the Positioning Pullman campaign. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.
Architecture requires massive amounts of money, time, and effort to come together. It's serious business. Most of the time. But here in Chicago there are a handful of designers that work humor into their architecture whenever they can, as a way to satirize the practice of architecture and the cultures that surround it, or as a way to invite new people into the conversation. For A Lot You Got to Holler's fourth episode, we're joined by Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer of Design with Company, as well as Ania Jaworska and artist/musician/designer Beverly Fresh. Free with each download: Design with Company's theme park ride of Midwestern folkways, Ania Jaworska's peerless knowledge of Polish interior design folk tales, and Beverly Fresh's proposal for the Graham Foundation bookstore that's truly, truly ahead of its time. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce and Nick Cage's pores.
Chicago's most valuable natural asset is its lakefront, forever free, public, and protected by law. This lakefront is so valuable, argues the architects at Port Urbanism, that we need more of it to pay off the city's massive debts. Or (if you ask the designers at UrbanLab) newly built islands in the lake must be drafted into relieving pressure from an overstressed storm drain system by filtering and cleaning the city's water. Featured at the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Port Urbanism and UrbanLab's lakefront proposals offer infrastructural fixes to some of Chicago's most dire emergencies. They also colonize a near-sacred urban vista with varying degrees of public and private space; not the type of thing you can do without getting through some pretty contentious community town hall meetings. Hosted by Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman, with guests Andrew Moddrell of Port Urbanism and Martin Felsen of UrbanLab. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.
Depending on who's telling the tale, the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago's Near North Side are either patient-zero for urban dysfunction and decay, or a humble high-rise utopia, Corbusier's Radiant City with soul. But at the end of the day it was home to 15,000 people. Cabrini-Green was mostly demolished by 2011, but its legacy both haunts, or enriches, the city, depending on who you ask. Co-hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman asked two Chicagoans: Chicago filmmaker Ronit Bezalel, whose film "70 Acres in Chicago" spent 20 years tracing the decline of of this community; and artist, designer, and educator Andres Hernandez, whose exhibit "Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)Generation" at the Glass Curtain Gallery explored how the ghosts of Cabrini-Green still settle over our pop-culture landscape. Special thanks to recording studio engineer Tim Joyce.