35. Architecture of Normal

Daniel Kaven is the author of Architecture of Normal: The Colonization of the American Landscape, a book that views the built environment through the lens of successive developments in transportation. An architect and visual artist hailing from Albuquerque, now calling Portland home, Kaven takes on suburbanization, flying cars, and why “Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”

Intro/Outro: The Big Country, by The Talking Heads

Discussed:

Ed Ruscha

Cibola – one of the Seven Cities of Gold

COVID as accelerant of moving from an experiential lifestyle to a destination-based lifestyle

Instagram feeds are the new main streets of America

United Airlines buys Archer – an air-taxi company

Henry Ford’s flying personal cars department

Prediction: First place to adopt flying cars – Saudi Arabia

The Main Street and Mall Retail Apocalypse

Future infrastructure and traffic planning will be about stratification of means of transport, literally

Just because we have the technology to do something, doesn’t mean we should

Do we want to live in places where we just order online and it gets delivered to a drone pad?

The Big Tech companies are nation-states, or partners thereof

Urbanism had a good run from 1990s to just before COVID.

The post-COVID boom is in places like suburban Boise – Boomtown ZoomTown, and it’s already fizzling.

“Generation Z needs to get out in the streets and be really pissed off about work-from-home.”

Architecture firms have really phoned in their responsibility to make places where people want to be – as a counterpoint to work-from-home, the tone of which is being set by Facebook and their brethren.

“There is no future with goggles on.”

“We don’t need to rip America apart and build the Metaverse.”

“How can people live a more spacious life in an urban environment?”

“We’re going to regret having made all these 5-over-1 wood-frame buildings with cheap materials.”