Night White Skies

Amy writes about arts, culture, and the environment. She is the Deputy Publisher of Guernica magazine and the Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books, where she also writes a monthly column called “Burning Worlds.” It explores how contemporary fiction addresses issues of climate change.  She is also the co-editor of the anthology, House on Fire: Dispatches from a Climate-Changed World, forthcoming 2021 from Catapult. She received her PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst  and has won numerous awards including from the National Science Foundation.  

John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. John May is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He previously served as a visiting professor at MIT, SCI-Arc, and UCLA. He is the author of Signal, Image, Architecture and the founding co-director and co-editor (with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) of Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice—an exploration of the philosophical and historical dimensions of contemporary design technologies. 

MILLIØNS

Holly Jean Buck is an Assistant Professor of Environment & Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in New York.  She researches how communities can be involved in the design of emerging environmental technologies, and works at the interface of geography, social science, and design. Her diverse research interests include agroecology and carbon farming, new energy technologies, artificial intelligence, and ecological restoration. She has written on climate engineering including humanitarian approaches, gender considerations, and human rights issues, and is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair and Restoration, from Verso Books. 

Today is a conversation with the author and critic James Bradley and we’re discussing his recent novel Ghost Species which looks to the implications of the great upheaval occurring around climate change. 

James Bradley is an author and critic. His books include the novels, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus and the Penguin Book of the Ocean and of course most recently Ghost Species.  

James Bradley Website <LINK>

Sylvia Lavin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Prior to her appointment at Princeton, Lavin was a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, where she was Chairperson from 1996 to 2006 and the Director of the Critical Studies M.A. and Ph.D. program from 2007 to 2017.  

Links:

BOOK…. ‘Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects’ <LINK>

Natasha Sandmeier’s work and research straddles the worlds of architecture and visualization – with a long-standing interest the role of media within the creation and production of speculative architectures and environments. She is an educator and leads the postgraduate Entertainment Studio at UCLA Architecture & Urban Design. She is an architect and founding partner of Studio OUR, and the author and editor of Little Worlds (London, 2014); a monograph of projects and essays re-examining the role of the architect within contemporary architectural culture. 

Links:

Deep Fake of Nancy Pelosi <LINK>

Unreal Engine 5 launch <LINK>

William Gibson Article <LINK>

Jeffrey S Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and recently received his Doctor of Design degree (DDes) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is a research fellow in the Office for Urbanization at Harvard and founding director of the research group Haecceitas Studio. His research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of “technical lands.” He has written several journal articles and book chapters on infrastructure, urbanization, and the history of technology, and is co-editor of Chasing the City: Models for Extra-Urban Investigations (Routledge, 2018), Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment (Routledge, 2019), and New Geographies 11 Extraterrestrial (Actar, 2019).

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Her research looks at the extended material flows of common construction materials and their social and ecological relations. Recent publications include Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2019) as well as an edited volume, Landscript 5: Material Culture – Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes (Jovis, 2017), and Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial (Actar, 2019), co-edited with Daniel Ibanez and Kiel Moe.

Larry Busbea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (MIT Press, 2007), The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction (forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City).

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His work as a designer and researcher is about how we imagine new spaces for future worlds, and about who is invited into them. His first book, Space Settlements—on NASA’s 1970s proposal to construct large cities in space for millions of people—is out now from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

Christopher Schaberg is Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA. In addition to his new book Searching for the Anthropocene: A Journey into the Environmental Humanities, he is the author of  The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness: The Nature of Flight (2017), and The Work of Literature In An Age of Post-Truth (2018). He is series co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons.

This week on Night White Skies is a conversation with Elisa Iturbe who is the guest editor for this most recent LOG issue #47  ‘Overcoming Carbon Form’.Elisa Iturbe is a critic at the Yale University School of Architecture (YSoA), where she also coordinates the dual-degree program between YSoA and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Today we’re talking about an article Charles wrote called ‘Aero-Gangplank and the Avant-Gard’ which appeared in LOG 46. The conversation begins by discussing the development of airports in the 1950’s and the eventual use of gangplanks that get passengers from the terminal to the plane. This moves us to discussions of other examples within architecture that have sought to overcome fixity (from the kinetic movements of the Aero Gangplank, to Clip On’s & Plug In’s of Archigram and others, to the non monumental system architecture of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace. ) Photo by Francois Robert.

Today is a conversation with Jo Lindsay Walton and we’re discussing a book called ‘Strange Economics’ which is edited by David F. Shultz. The book consists of 23 new science fiction pieces written specifically for the book that foreground various types of economic models. Jo is a guest editor of ‘Strange Economics’ and wrote the afterward for the book. Jo is also co-editor (with Polina Levontin) of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Lisa Feldman Barrett is author of the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Dr.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is the author of ‘The Good Metropolis, Between Urban Formlessness and Metropolitan Architecture’ (Birkhauser, 2018). Alexander is a designer, theorist, and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches design studios and courses in history & theory.

Dr. Kiang is a biometeorologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York. She conducts research on the interaction between the biosphere and the atmosphere, focusing on life on land. Dr. Kiang also relates this work to research in astrobiology, particularly with regard to how photosynthetic activity produces signs of life at the global scale and how these may exhibit adaptations to alternative environments on extrasolar planets, resulting in other “biosignatures” that might be detected by space telescopes.

Neil Denari is principal of Neil M. Denari Architects / NMDA and a Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. He is the author of Interrupted Projections (1996), Gyroscopic Horizons (1999), and MASS X (2018).

Neil Denari, Interrupted Projections. Canadian Center for Architecture. DIGITAL BOOK

This week is with Mark A. Cheetham discussing his book ‘Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the 60’s’

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. Rachel Armstrong leads Metabolism research in developing artificial biology systems showing qualities of near-living systems. Armstrong is the author of the books Origamy and Invisible Ecologies

‘The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do’.  Edward Tenner is a distinguished scholar of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers University Department of History. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Wilson Quarterly, and Forbes.com.

Perry Kulper, an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. He has recently published Pamphlet Architecture 34, ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows’ with Nat Chard. They are at work on a new book to be published by Routledge.

Dr. Catherine Bliss is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California San Francisco. Her research explores the sociology of race, gender and sexuality in science, medicine, and society. 

Today we’re discussing her book ‘Social by Nature, The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics’. We discuss the relationships between our body’s genetic makeup and the environments we live in.