Jason Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University Newark and one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers. His new book, out May 14, 2024, is Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers. In it, Barr takes a global view of why the quest to build up is as fierce as ever, and why skyscrapers remain so controversial. Join the Unfrozen interview with Barr, in which some record-breaking myths get busted.

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Intro/Outro: “Altitude Blues,” by Ladytron

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Discussed:

Mythbusting the Home Insurance Building

First Skyscrapers | Skyscraper Firsts Forum

LeRoy Buffington’s skyscraper patent

Mythbusting The Skyscraper Index

The Line

Jeddah Tower

Joel Garreau’s Edge City

Emaar’s real estate play at Burj Khalifa: Downtown Dubai

Legends Tower, Oklahoma City

Empire State Building

China’s “build it” economy

“Zero Gravity Living”

Nashville and Oracle

Detroit and Dan Gilbert

Newark renaissance

Center City District (Philadelphia) study: Downtowns Rebound

Karen Seto (Yale)'s studies on tall building height canopies

Kevin Kelley, a self-described “attention architect,” is a co-founding partner of design firm Shook Kelley and author of Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together. In our digitized world of ghost commerce, he believes there is still a place for real places, and that it is incumbent on architects to stop looking down their noses at retail, the essential lubricant of urban life, and start designing places that matter.

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Intro/Outro: “Friction,” by Television

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Discussed:

Bass Pro Shops at the Memphis Pyramid

Against 15-Minute Delivery

“The Bonfire Effect,” courtesy Loxahatchie, Florida

Participation mystique, as per Jung, as per Lucien Levy-Bruhl

“TheAnxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt

“Harvard Guide to Shopping” by Rem Koolhaas et. al.

Prior Unfrozen commentary on the replacement for the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph

Robert Venturi on Las Vegas

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Yaromir Steiner and Easton Town Center, Columbus

Victor Gruen

Country Club Plaza, Kansas City

The Grove, Los Angeles

The Farmer’s Market, Los Angeles

Larchmont, Los Angeles

Hollywood and Highland (now Ovation), Los Angeles

Harley-Davidson dealerships’ Parts Bar

Mercado Gonzalez, Costa Mesa, CA

Craig Hutson has worked in research and development in academia and industry and is fascinated with the history of Chicago’s lakefront. When seeking a definitive book about the history of Illinois Center and Lakeshore East, the air-rights developments above former docklands and railyards east of the Loop, he realized there wasn’t one, and he decided to write it himself.

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Intro/Outro: “Nighttime in the Switching Yard,” by Warren Zevon

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Discussed:

Illinois Central Railroad

Illinois Center

Lakeshore East

Millennium Park

Maggie Daley Park

Aqua

St. Regis Chicago

Outer Drive East (400 East Randolph)

Blue Cross Blue Shield Tower

The Park at Lakeshore East

Millennium Station

Hyatt Regency Chicago

Chicago Pedway

Boulevard East

Magellan Development Group

James Loewenberg

In every office, there is someone with so much accumulated knowledge the boss wants to “clone” them. At structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti (TT), they’ve basically done that. The firm has taken the concept of a “digital twin” to a newly literal level – engineers can now quiz a synthetic clone of the firm’s in-house welding and metallurgy expert, constructed from 30 years of his files and emails. Chief Technology Officer Robert Otani tells Unfrozen where TT is taking generative artificial intelligence (GAI) next.

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Intro/Outro: “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx

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Discussed:

·     ZHA’s Patrik Schumacher keynote at the AIA Center for Architecture’s AI+A Symposium, 16 December 2023

·     Dall-E, ChatGPT, Midjourney, OpenAI

·     HOU 3000: Serpentine Galleries’ virtual chief curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist

·     TT’s Spark Intranet

·     Cornell Tech Jacobs Institute: The Future of Generative AI in Architecture, Design and Engineering

·     TT made a digital twin of welding and metallurgy expert Mike DeLashmit. The real Mike gives "Mike 2.0" a “4.7 out of 5” in terms of the accuracy of its answers.

·     Converting scanned PDF drawings with annotations into vectors + tabular data

·     Google Gemini

·     A “hallucination throttle” for generative AI iterations on existing documents

·     Using AI to optimize material quantities, operational energy, and eventually, embodied carbon

Mankind’s quest for verticality has an underexplored dimension: the queasy feeling of vertigo many experience when close to the edge of a sheer drop. Davide Deriu, Reader in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Westminster, London, has taken on the relative lack of research into the subject with an interdisciplinary approach, captured in his book On Balance: Architecture and Vertigo. Come, stand on the edge with us.

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Intro/Outro: “Vertigo” by U2

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Discussed:

           Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

         Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, Stephen Graham, 2016

         Vertigo in the City program at University of Westminster, 2015

       The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 1979

         Funambulism

             Jean François "Blondin" Gravelet – Niagara Falls wire walk, 1859

       Philippe Petit, World Trade Center wire walk, 1974

             Jan Gehl on humans’ “natural” habitat in horizontal planes

           Singapore’s HDB social high-rises

            Mies’ insertion of ventilation grilles in front of the glass curtain wall at the Seagram Building, 1958

          Prosper Meniere, father of the vestibular sciences