Mario Carpo

The NWS podcast is specifically tied to architecture and design. I think you all know that. Even more so, its focus is on understanding and foreshadowing the future of the discipline as both the environment and the human body is actively open for design. I bring on a wide range of quests from a broad range of disciplines that can help fill out the conversation and I do my best not to make the conversations come across as too narrow!.… But with that said, this particular episode might be the most architectural specific podcast…and I hope it’s still something that non-architects will still find appealing and clear. But I thought the discussion was necessary. So lets see what happens.

This episode is a conversation with the architectural historian Mario Carpo who wrote a short piece for Metropolis Magazine about a month ago called ​“Post-Digital ​“Quitters”: Why the Shift Toward Collage Is Worrying”. The piece is a critique against a current resurgence in the representational techniques and forms of post modernism, which existed 35 years ago. Two questions come to mind here: one: what is the disciplinary reasoning for re-investigating these forms and techniques including collage and axonometric drawings? and two: I think much more importantly, why does there appear to be an active avoidance in this work to the pressures associated with our current twenty first century (technologies of computing, human subjectivity, environmental change, communication and monitoring to name just a few) 

Mario and I decided prior to recording this that we would not spend our time critiquing what we both agree is a concern for the discipline but instead focus on the opportunities ahead…but we do spend a few moment in the beginning contextualizing the starting point.

Hope you enjoy.