Building Strong Personal Christian Character - Pastor Philip Olubakin

Hey, I'm Liz Grunning of the Vintage In Blog and you're listening to U.S. Modernist radio. Welcome to U.S. Modernist Radio, where we talk and laugh with people who enjoy own, create, dream about, preserve, love, and hate. Modernist architecture, the most exciting and controversial buildings in the world. I'm Tom Guile. Jim Stevens is the brand new dean of the University of Arkansas's Bay Jones School of Architecture and Design and we managed to catch him on day one of his new job. Later, Florida Architect Max Strang talks about his latest house. Philip Kinneka, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post, will talk with us about music, morning, ballrooms, and Bach. We'll wrap things up with our musical guest, pianist Rick Maltese. And now, your host, Mr. Modernism George Smart. Thanks, Tom. Have you ever noticed that Modernism is like a church? The architects are the priests. Dead architects who were the most successful become saints and get more venerated with time. Architects are the only ones licensed, in most states, to perform certain sacraments, except for those heretical owners who try, mostly unsuccessfully, to design in their own. The architecture schools, with the priesthood as formed, are seminaries where novitiates must endure an ever-increasing vow of poverty, as the economy, all-nighters, and AI hammers the profession. Graduates emerge, speaking a language, like Latin, that even their own families cannot follow. The mystical wing of Modernism is the organic architects, with their wild shapes and fascinating materials. Their devotion to purity is a faith that even other architects find hard to understand. Foundations and university libraries guard their relics, keeping plans, models, and photographs intact, for the second coming, a Frank Lloyd Wright, who certainly would come back if he could, and request an actual sainthood from the actual Pope. Modernism week and Palm Springs is the ultimate religious pilgrimage. It's the one week the church stands together. The academy preaches to the faithful. The Palm Springs houses open their doors, and everyone takes communion and tuna tartar at those fabulous Modernism week parties. Then there's the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design, which sounds like a cult, but it's actually one of the finest groups working to save us all. Neutra believes bad buildings damage the human nervous system, and good ones keep us healthy. This group continues to spread that invaluable message. New Modernist homeowners, by and large, learn at closing that four non-profit organizations they've never heard of have very strong opinions about their mid-century house, and for some reason, two women, one in a very short dress, are filming Instagram reels in the front yard. House foundations are like the strides. Entire 501c3s built around treasured sites, like the Glass House, the Stahl House, and Falling Water. Each has a board, a newsletter, and a pretty good online gift shop, with a need for donations, because water damage has no religion. However, the collection plate comes from about the same 300 major donors who cannot fund everybody, so we work to schedule around each other, cross-promote, and maintain collaboration and collegiality, because the alternative is unproductive squabbling. A rising tide raises all boats, and we don't have to agree on everything to work together. And U.S. Modernist? Well, we are the monks in the scriptorium, scanning the ancient scrolls year after year, documenting the thousands of sacred modernist sites. It's like "Name of the Rose" with Martinis, and Sinatra, or maybe a little Kojak. Who loves you, baby? We do. U.S. Modernist Radio is underwritten by the Brent R. Harris Charitable Trust, Restore of Richard Neutrus Kaufman Desert House in Palm Springs, and six other houses in California. By the Efe Jones Conservancy, preserving the legacy of modernist architecture in Northwest Arkansas, efejonesconservancy.org, and by Diane Bald in the Budman family, restoring significant architecture in Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu, and Palm Springs. Jim Stevens founded MakeLab, a digital fabrication lab whose CNC milling machine, light enough to check his airline luggage, has traveled the projects in Albania, India, and Kosovo. With degrees from Savannah College of Art and Design, Go Bees, NC State, Go Wolfback, and a PhD from the University of Ferrara. Go Italy! Jim is the new dean of the Feijones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. Go Razorbacks! George cut up with Jim Stevens on his very first day on the job. We're recording this on August 15th. Talking to Jim Stevens at the University of Arkansas, Jim, how's it going being dean so far? Well, it's been about four hours, so far so good. I arrived last week, packed my car and drove to Feville, so it's been going really well. Great welcome from all the people here, the faculty, and the staff, so I'm excited to get started. Well, thank you for being with us on your first day. That's really special. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Tell our listeners what you have to go through to be a dean, how does it work these days? Is there a phone thing? Is there a zoom thing? Do you go to Arkansas? What was the process for applying for this? Today, come to you. Do you come to them? How's it work? Yeah, it's maybe a lot different than what people probably experienced in professional practice, particularly in architecture. First, I would say, it's one of those things where I never said, I'm going to be a dean when I grow up. It's more that you evolve and it becomes a natural path of your own contributions to the profession, but the way that this time that it worked, I was reached out to by a firm hired by the university who kind of looks at who might be good and interested in the country and was asked to apply. I did that, and yeah, we did zoom interview. It was very formal, formal questions, and then a few weeks later, I was notified that they did want me to visit. And what's typical and higher ed, is you'll have between three and four candidates that do come in and visit the campus. So I was here for two days, I believe, and in Fayetteville, and met as many people as you can possibly fit in a two-day period. Then I left and waited, which is also typical. You don't hear much until you hear. So I learned in June from the university that I had been selected, and it took us a couple weeks to work out all the details and the rest of history. Now, on your first day in office, do you get to do things sort of presidential like are there executive orders that you write up today about how things are going to go at the school? Well, no, not yet. No, I have already attended one meeting, which of course was about HR and budgets, so there are already consequential things that I'm learning about that we need to decide. And all really good stuff, because here we're very fortunate in the Faginian school that I like to say we have the best problems and higher ed at the moment, because we have a growing student body. A lot of interest in studying architecture and design here at the University of Arkansas. So a lot of it is us responding to growth and ensuring that we have the faculty on the funding and places to support students. Now, when you're interviewing, I mean, what kind of things do you get asked as a candidate? Are they expecting you, for example, to like come in with a vision? Are you doing the vision thing? Or are you like, here's a problem, Jim, how would you fix it? That's a really good question. In fact, it's just, I don't mind saying here, it's something that a little bit frustrates me in the hiring process for deans from all disciplines. They absolutely ask you what your vision is for the future. And for me, it's actually a little difficult to maybe even not appropriate to step into a place that you've never spent any time with people that you've only met a few of and then to be able to in a presumptuous way tell them what the vision should be. So I didn't approach it that way. I approached it from the standpoint that there is a long legacy here at the Fagerian School of Design Excellence through a number of deans, through a number of very successful practitioners who you named at the beginning of the show. And my interest was was coming and learning as much as I can about that and then building upon that foundation and chart, of course, together with the faculty. And I think that's exactly what's needed right now here in Arkansas. So even before I started, I attended a meeting with the faculty to kind of start that process. of understanding this place and understanding its best coursework. Of course, I have many ideas about where all schools should go. And I'm happy to share those, but I also want to take into account the legacy of this place and the people who are here that have made it to school that are not yet. - So when they ask you about your vision and you gave them that kind of answer and they looked at you blankly, what did they ask you next? - Well, they didn't look at me blankly. I mean, I think that I have no lack of ideas and I think Palestinians in the country and most architects, as you know, have lots of ideas. But just like a good design project, we can have lots of ideas but we can't really start the design process until we actually know the context and the limits in which we're working. And that was the point I'm making. So I'm in the phase now of understanding that and then I'll have lots of ideas. But certainly, every school of architecture in the country needs to be thinking about technology and how that's going to change yet again within our careers and how that will disrupt the way that we design how labor is distributed through our profession, et cetera. Of course, we have to think about that and that will be something that we're working with here. We need to be thinking about how we use materials and how we work and work ecological ways. Of course, we have the Anthony Timberland Center here, which is, in my opinion, easily the best facility for wood research and architecture in the country. Of course, we need to be thinking about that and that need a big part of our future is in wood research and wood utilization research. So all of those things are there and we talk about them but how it gets implemented in a larger vision is something that's forming just like I would if this was an architecture project. - Okay, fair enough. Now, when I talk to a lot of mid-career architects about their time in school, one of the things that comes up over and over and over is they wished that their school had taught them more about business and marketing while they were there and almost no school that I know of does that, right? - Well, there are a few. I mean, there are schools that offer dual degrees. You can get an M-R-Can-MBA at a number of schools I've seen and we obviously do have professional practice courses, et cetera, but those are typically focused on ethics and the canon about ethics of AA and other and of legal matters of professional practice. I would agree with that to a certain extent. What I would say to someone who said that is the reality is is when we educate architects, let's say that the core of the accredited degree, if you think of a three-year master's degree or a five-year bachelor of architecture's degree, it's pretty full of just teaching architects the fundamentals of design and the fundamentals of building and making building an architecture. We certainly could do a better job, of course. And I do think we are doing as the academy in general, a better job of moving closer to the practical needs of practice. I do think programs such as Arkansas that have robust design build programs where students are not only designing, but building their designs and a big part of that design is aligning with and staying on a budget, which teaches them that budgetary limits and working with the actual dollar and sense of building buildings. But the reality is is that we have to teach all the things that we taught 1,000 years ago in architecture schools, plus new technology, plus the legal ramifications of what we're doing in a modern society, et cetera. But it's definitely something that we think about. - Can AI, is it sophisticated enough within architecture to take a plan and tell you how much is this going to cost? So you get some sort of figure about how well your design is going to fit a budget. I mean, even plus or minus 20% would be helpful sometimes. - Well, I think when you look at a plan and come up with a cost, there's a lot of assumptions being made, obviously, about labor cost, material cost. And so the question is, does the AI have the data that they can draw into making an informed decision or is the human with that many years of experience in that place, in that locale better? And my answer to that would be, it depends on who you ask and where you are if they would say that the AI would be better. What I do know is that we're heading in a direction where the AI is going to get infinitely better in a shorter period of time. And I think the profession needs to, and society in a much broader sense, needs to reconcile our role as people, not algorithms in the creation of our built environment. And that's a big question, not just for the profession, but for higher ed, for our society. - You are part of the EFA Jones school. Tell our listeners who EFA Jones was. - So EFA Jones was an architect, obviously, and he was in the office of Frank Ward Wright. It was one of many of Frank Ward Wright's, I guess you could say students, he did most of his training. And he became the first dean here at EFA Jones school. And he came quite literally from Fadwell, from Tally Asset, and working with Frank Ward Wright. And what he had learned from Wright and how he evolved as an architect as architecture kind of evolved through modernism, through postmodernism, he kind of maintained his voice in that throughout his whole career. And it really put that imprint on Arkansas. And of course, on the world and on the country, but it's poppable here in Fadwell and Arkansas, his influence. Not just on the landscape and how it's thought about, but even the importance that design has in the region, it I think is much due to his influence and how he came here. Not that indifferent, then, say Campephner in Raleigh and how important design is in the Triangle area. - You grew up in Raleigh? - I did. - I did, and that influence of Campephner. And then of course, many of the architects that followed him had an influence on me, just in seeing those buildings, but also being influenced by the school design just being around it, had an impact on me. - Now, when I've talked to Deans previously, they often reference the dean of their school when they were back in school. - It's true. - And I assume with you, that was Marvin Malica? - It was Marvin, yes. And one of the things about Marvin that I really admired is his ability to communicate to the general public, the importance of design. So, whatever planning or design kind of controversy there was in Raleigh or in North Carolina at the time, he would interject himself into that conversation and be at an editorial in the news of observer or whatever the mechanism he had. And I thought he was quite good at explaining. My litmus test was my father who was as far from a designer as you can get, but he would mention to me, hey, I read an article in the N&O by Marvin, and I kind of understand what he means. And I thought, wow, that's good, that's important. But you're right, everybody refers back to their dean. There are people here in Fayetteville, of course, that remember Fay Jones and other Deans. When I was at Clemson, it was, of course, Dean Harlem McClure, who was prolific in a way that Camp Fener was. So yeah, everybody has their dean, so to speak, that had an impact on them. - Now, are you gonna start dressing in black like Marvin did? (laughing) - Yeah, well, you know, I think the dressing in black is the easy part, but I don't think I'll ever have his braining here, which was so incredible. So yeah. - How do you decide when you come in as a new dean? How do you decide like the timeline for nudging things forward? - I know in government, you know, some people come into office, and it's very important for them to make a splash the first week, and the other people you won't see for, you know, three to six months. I mean, how do you roll out things as a new executive? - Yeah, I don't think there's a right or wrong way. It's really based on the place that you're in. The goal that I have for myself is, you know, in a hundred days, which, you know, I know it's pulled from politics a little bit, but in a hundred days, that's almost a semester. That's getting towards the end of the semester. My hope is, is that I've met with every single person that works here. - How many is that so far? - Oh jeez, I don't even know. Probably in the full time in the '60s or '70s of people. I mean, the first day, I'm not sure, but I know that's approximately the number. I've met with every single one of them. I have a series of questions around how we ensure that our students have the best experience possible, how this can be a great place to work for both faculty and students to have a strong studio culture. And of course, how we can expand our research, our critical practice, and our impact on the region, the country, and the world. And I know there's a big questions, but I'm gonna take the time to meet with every single one of them and talk to them about it. And also I'm meeting with groups of students, groups of faculty, groups of staff. And my hope is, now that I'm putting it out in the world Bye. somebody can bring this back to me, my hope is towards the end of the semester, I'm able to produce what I've heard, what I've seen, and a brief report that goes out to everybody, and that's the starting point for where I will start to say here are some things that I think we must do and our strategic plan and go forward. Benville and Fayetteville, besides being famous for E. Fay Jones is famous for Walmart, which has poured billions of dollars into the area, making it really a destination for people to come and see all the design. Tell us about Crystal Bridges, which is kind of the masterpiece of the area. Absolutely. Well, it's obviously as Mocha Softy designed building and being in at least in its landscape, feeling like a rural location, you can visit one of the world's great contemporary art museums. In addition to the art, there is a Francois de Wright home, which was my understanding dismantled piece by piece and meticulously reconstructed on the site, which is pretty incredible. It also integrates with the nature pretty phenomenally, so you can go out similar to what we have in Raleigh at the Museum of Art and how the greenway passes through. You can have a similar kind of experience there, kind of enjoying the landscape around. So it is an incredible asset that we have here in Northwest South Arkansas, just quite literally on our doorstep, and they have exhibitions regularly that many people would typically have to get a New York Chicago L.A. Simpsiskot to see. So we're very fortunate to have it. And of course, much of that would not have happened without philanthropy from the Walten's, but also from other corporations like Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt Trucking. So it's quite a hub for economics. In fact, I mentioned to somebody the other day that in some ways, Fadeville feels a lot like Raleigh did when I was a kid, meaning that the RTP, when I was growing up in Raleigh, was a new thing. And I think when I was in elementary school, or right before it was when IBM moved from Binghamton, New York to RTP. And so I grew up in the North Hills neighborhood, which was essentially built to kind of accommodate all of these new people come into town. And it kind of feels that way with the corporations and the RTP area. It has that same culture, I guess you could say, which is a positive thing. So it felt very at kind of when I arrived here. And it's attracting more attention too. You've got a lot of new structures going up. You've got I think a new performing art center amphitheater going in and they converted what was at a sugar factory is now the the momentum. Yeah, momentum. Yeah. And of course, our Anthony Timberlain's center. And we have a Todd Williams and Billy Chin building going up next door, which is going to be a part of our school of art. I believe it's going to be a gallery building for exhibitions. There will be next door to the Anthony Timberlain's center. So a lot going on. And you can fly into Northwest Arkansas airport, which is not that old either. It didn't exist not that long ago. Yeah, this is my understanding. So we're very fortunate for this part of the world, which is typically as they say a flyover area where the planes kind of continue on to the west. I have direct flights to most major cities, Atlanta, DC, New York, Chicago, LA, Las Vegas, I believe, and many places in Florida. I just need breeze to connect Raleigh and then I'll be set. That would be fantastic, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would. It would. We'll bring a lot of groups down there if that happens. That's right. That's right. Jim, thanks so much for talking with me. And best of luck to you. This being your first day on the rest of your semester. I appreciate it. And hopefully we can follow up in a year or two and talk about the successes. So I look forward to it. That was George's conversation with Jim Stevens. Returning podcast guest Max Strang grew up around a gene-leady-designed family home in Winter Haven, Florida. He later apprenticed under-leady and in 1998 found it his own firm. Max has specialized in houses made to survive Florida's heat, humidity, and hurricanes. Back in the day, his limestone rock house and coconut grove stood in for a drug lord's jungle lair in Miami Vice. Last year, his firm was AIA Florida's 2025 firm of the year. Here's George's conversation with Max Strang. Hey Max, it's good to see you again. Likewise. This has been, I think this is the second or third time we've gotten together, right? Exactly, exactly. And you have just been on fire down there in Miami with new houses and a line of furniture you're putting out. Yeah, we've been extremely busy. I'm very thankful that I decided to open my firm in South Florida 25 years ago because since then it looks like the rest of the world has discovered has rediscovered Miami. Tell our listeners a little bit about growing up with gene-leady and your long association with him. I grew up in a gene-leady design house in Winter Haven, Florida. The gene-leady was one of those Sarasota school architects and he started his practice in Winter Haven in 1954. So I grew up surrounded by all of this gene-leady modern architecture. And you became an architect? Surprise, surprise. I did. I think probably just that upbringing, even though I didn't know it, I was getting his architectural education my whole life and eventually set myself on the way to becoming an architect. And you work for a bunch of different well-known firms, which ones along the way? The first one was actually gene-leady. I interned in his office. I think fresh out of the University of Florida undergraduate. And then when I was pursuing my masters at Columbia, I worked for Zaha Hadid in London for a summer. And then later for shop architects in New York. I was shop's first employee. Really? Yep. Wow. You know, they're getting quite famous in New York now. All over the world. They have amazing projects. Really inspiring work. Tell me about this new table, the double T table, which is inspired by gene-leady's famous double T concrete beams, right? Correct. That was his signature move, if you will, right? Gene-leady fell in love with this pre-cast concrete building system. And deployed this double T system his entire career, you know, after 1960. I think he first discovered this concrete pre-cast system in Sarasota, an architect named Tim Sebert designed the Siesta Key Beach Pavilion. He was only using single T's, not double T's, but I think Gene was inspired by that particular project. And in 1961, he designed his own office with these double T's. Did anybody pick up the mantle of double T's after Gene-leady? I know. It was, um, actually, there's a fascinating story here with Gordon Bunch-Aft. If you want to do a diversion, please. Yeah. Okay. So Gordon Bunch-Aft, you know, from SOM, right? He was their chief of design for decades, I imagine. Gordon Bunch-Aft was visiting Winter Haven, Florida, where Louis Skidmore from Skidmore Owings and Merrill lived out the final years of his life and he ended up passing away in Winter Haven. Undoubtedly Gordon visited Gene-leady in his pre-cast concrete office there. This is about 1962 or '63. And on the boards, if you will, was the project for Gene-leady's Ellison Residence. And I'm sure that's on your archives there. It's one of Gene's first double T residences. And I think that Gordon Bunch-Aft, and I'm thinking it's not confirmed, was inspired by this and led him to design his own double T residence in the Hamptons, which is known as either the Bunch-Aft residence or the Travertine residence. And that is the one that you might remember. There was some drama or scandal and Martha Stewart. She bought it and donated it to MoMA, then something happened and it got torn down sadly. But if you put two images of the Ellison Residence and the Bunch-Aft residence right next to each other, they're definitely cousins. Let's just, we'll leave it at that. I was fascinated to hear that you have turned this double T structure into a piece of furniture that people can buy. Yeah, so it's a passion project for me. My firm collaborated with a great concrete furnishing, or what's the right word? They do all things concrete, but it's based in Oakland, California. It's called Monos Made. And our team at Strang had a great rapport with the team at Monos, and especially Joe Lynch, their head of product. And we collaborated on this design for a double T coffee table. To me, it seemed like this table was inevitable. We look at it it's so simple and so beautiful, and it can be as raw and just in concrete, or we can make it with tarazo or other things too, right? It's very versatile. But we just launched this several months ago. We had a launch event here in South Florida, and then we also recently had it up at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture in Manhattan, and it was part of New York by Design Week. I got to ask how much does it weigh a lot a lot. Yeah. So it's not going anywhere. So once you put it, make sure that's where you want it because it takes three or four people to move it. It's great for South Florida. You don't have to move it in if a hurricane's coming and you're using it in an outdoor setting. But I guess you could hide underneath that if you wanted to. That's true. You'll be safe. You'll be safe. But you know, it is this hand-traveled concrete finish. It's beautiful. It comes in a lot of different finishes as I mentioned. But usually, you know, it's this kind of sandy or chalk colored raw concrete that we like. But it weighs about, depending on the size that you get. We offer different sizes. The ones, the prototypes that we've first made or the first batch is around 480 pounds. So it's heavy. Yeah. Now, most people know the double teeth, I think. They may not know to call it that. But they see them on highway bridges. That's where they're most prominent. Correct. It was probably first used predominantly in industrial architecture, transportation or warehouses. Really mundane uses. But Gene Leedy, really, he tamed it, right? And brought it into the residential fold as well. And if you look at scores and scores of Leedy's projects, residential and commercial, he just deployed it in a way that it was like poetry, like structural poetry. I visited a house of his near Charlotte that had these giant beams on one floor. And then below that, it was supporting over this huge Olympic-sized pool. And it was just astonishing to see all of that together in a house. Correct. I think that's the keel hack residence you're referring to, right? But, you know, he married that raw expression of these double teeth with, I believe, that had like a brownish, buff-colored brick or something to it, right? There's another finish. But yeah, that was, he loved the double teeth because they could really span, you know, up to 60, 70 feet. So it was bold architecture. Our double teeth spans about two feet here in the table configuration. But it's the same profiles with these curved edges. But yeah, that house in North Carolina was a great one. Your firm is now working on one of the most significant residential projects, a huge house in Golden Beach, Florida. Understand it's what, 50,000 square feet? It's not that big, but it's big, right? But it's directly on the sand, on the water, in Golden Beach. And Golden Beach is the northernmost community in Miami-Dade County. But most all of the county, it's, you don't have an opportunity to build a house directly on the sand, if you will. So there's this little stretch called Golden Beach that has homes on the sand. So it's a, it's a big house, it's a great house, it's under construction right now. If all goes well, we'll be finishing it late next year. So what are some of the challenges of designing a house on the beach? Are there a lot of regulatory hoops you have to go through? Enormous, enormous. And for good reason, there's a lot of these coastal setback requirements, building in a velocity flood zone, also working with local municipalities, who until recently had been sleepy little beachside communities. And now, you know, there's some large, very complex residences going up there. We have some great clients from Boston on this particular project. And we wanted to build something for them. And their extended family that really took advantage of the site and the climate and enabled the outdoor lifestyle that, you know, everybody keeps moving to Miami for. It seems like at that size, it's really more of a compound than a house, right? You're talking multiple buildings. It is, but we've connected them with these, you know, large shaded overhangs and such. And it's a very wide lot. And we kind of broke it up into three masses and had a courtyard just to kind of break up the scale. But it's common with these coastal homes because of the flood levels. The main level doesn't start till like 12 feet off the ground, right? So a lot of these homes get a bad route for being considered so big because they have to start a pie in the air because of the hurricane storm surges and stuff. Yeah. So do you have double tea structures in this house? I don't, you know, I had not employed the double tea myself yet. I think I wanted to keep some healthy distance between genes work in my own. So for me, this, this table was a fun little pivot, you know, but I do hope in the coming years, I'll find the right project and the right time to celebrate with the double tea. Now, since you're not using that, what do you use to protect the house from the heat and the tides, the global warming, the hurricanes, the, you know, random ship plowing on shore. I mean, all those perils of Florida. And the mosquitoes, you know. So in South Florida, especially, you know, probably from Palm Beach down to Miami, the predominant building method on coastal lots such as these is poured in place concrete. And that's where you build all the formwork. You pour the concrete in it, then you strip the concrete formwork away. And you're left with this concrete shell. I might also mention that in most places, we have to position the building on top of a pile foundation system. And these concrete piles go down 20, 25 feet through the sand, you know, and muck until they hit either bedrock or just get to a bearing capacity just based on their length. So these are formidable foundations, formidable structures for these homes. You know, once you get the foundations, you feel like you could go up another 20 or 30 floors. For those reasons, we have to lift the bottom floors of the house up, you know, considerably above the ground to allow those storm surges to come through. Yes, that'll probably come in handy with sea level rise as well down the road. But the labor force in South Florida and just the, you know, to deal with the wind speeds and the surges, the port and place concrete is the way to go. And sometimes we're able to express it. You know, I love opportunities to either show a board form concrete or just a nice exposed concrete wall. In a house at size, you're going to have some amenities. I mean, 20 years ago, it was the in-home media room. But now, what are people asking for in their compounds? You name it, you know, to me, the biggest luxury of all is privacy, right? So I love to design homes that the occupant can feel like they have all the privacy in the world and block out views of the other homes. So, but as far as amenities, yes, we have the line sellers. We have the media room still. We've done things such as, you know, F1 simulator rooms. We've even done a shooting range inside a house and other rooms, safe rooms, that kind of stuff. But those are all bells and whistles. You know what I mean? To me, the biggest amenity, if you will, is a client that appreciates good design, appreciates good architecture and just is a partner through the design process because that engages them and at the end of the day, there's this appreciation for the overall design. Well, of course, I mean, that's the ideal client, right? We can say we get some less than ideal clients sometime that just we get hired because they've heard our name or our reputation. But at the end of the day, they could unfortunately care less about the design. So it's good to weed those out if we can't early. But we've been very fortunate recently just to been receiving some great commissions and absolutely great clients along the way. Max, where can people look for this table? Is there a website? Yep. You can look on our website, stringed up design. We have a link to it. But the best way probably is with Monos made. I think it's www.monos-made.com. How do you spell Monos? M-A-N-O-S. Okay. Obviously, just quickly, you can do an online search for string Monos-Double-T and I'm sure it'll pop right up there. If you happen to be in South Florida, we have some in a showroom called Andrew's showroom in the Palm Beach area. We just delivered one to the Jean-Ledie House in Winter Haven. So that was a nice full circle moment to have that there. Yeah. And we hope to get one over to the umbrella house in Sarasota as well. Okay. It's a fun table. It's a great table. It works great indoor on a fluffy carpet and, you know, dressed up. But it also works well outside as in the garden or as a outdoor furniture piece too. Max, thanks for talking with me. It's always a pleasure. I always enjoy these chores and take care. Georgia's speaking with Max Strang. Since 2011, Philip Kimekot has been the Washington Post Art and Architecture Critic after joining as Classical Music Critic in 1999. In 2013, he won the Pulitzer Prize, joining a pantheon that includes past podcasts, Inga Safran, Blair Cayman, Mark Lampster, Paul Goldberger, and Alexandra Lang. Raised in Sconnected New York and educated at Deep Springs College, sorry, no team name, Handyale, Go Bulldogs. He's also written for the new Republic, Opera News, and Gramophone. Speaking of music, here's George with Philip Kimekot. Philip, before we start talking about architecture, let's talk a little bit about music. I understand that you took on a Mount Everest sort of challenge of learning the Goldberg variations by Bach, which I was not familiar with, but I've been reading up on it a little bit. They're exceptionally difficult, and it seems like only a few people have attempted this. Is that right? - Well, professional pianists will play this, but it's a piece that is beyond the reach of most amateurs, including me. I was only able to get maybe 30 to 40% of the piece really into my fingers, but it was more about sort of the struggle with the piece than it was ever about any expectation of being able to play this at a professional level. - And this was designed for the harpsichord originally? - It was really written for the harpsichord or perhaps the clavichord, we don't really know. What we know is that Bach was writing a series of kind of monumental keyboard works for organ and for harpsichord or generically the keyboard at the time, probably not the piano. He was not a fan of the early piano four days, which were at that point still pretty primitive instruments. His instrument really was privately the clavichord or in a more sort of public sense, the harpsichord. - And why did he put this kind of opus together? - You know, I think he was really one of those figures like Newton or Shakespeare. There was a sense of him wanting to leave as complete a sense of having exhausted the possibilities of a medium as he could, and he does that with the fugue. And in the Goldberg variations, he does that with the canon, which is a much more sort of technically complicated form of counterpoint where one voice is directly mimicking or repeating another often at a different interval. It becomes extremely complicated. And Bach sort of takes this form of canon and I think he decides we're going to work out basically every possibility we can within a reasonable time frame of about 45 minutes to an hour as possible. - So who's climbed this mountain? What professional pianist has gotten like all the way through and is most known for performing this? - Well, most famous, it's Glenn Gould who records this in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s. He's by no means the only pianist to record it. If you go on looking for a recording, you'll find dozens and dozens and dozens. But he's the one who really introduces it kind of as repurposed, probably appropriate for our topic today, repurposed kind of as a modern piece. You know, this is a piece that comes from the 18th century, but this is the beginning of a kind of a new area of audio files and recording, long playing records. And Gould comes out with this recording that just takes everybody by surprise in the 1950s. 'Cause it's this piece that nobody had really thought to sort of hold up for its complexity rather than as a antiquarian piece. And Gould just absolutely re-thinks it. And you'll find generations of people sort of look back as a touchstone of music. - Well, let's shift to architecture. You worked for The Washington Post in Washington DC. I've heard, I'm not quite sure. Is there some guy in high office that's taking an interest in changing things around Washington? - It's been a remarkable time to be writing about architecture. I've been writing about architecture in DC for, I don't know, 15, 20 years at least. And it was a fairly sleepy subject. I would be thrilled if a major architect came to town to do some new building, but it didn't happen all that often for a number of reasons that we can talk about that. But then Trump arrived. And suddenly it is a subject that everybody's paying attention to because he's making huge changes. He's undertaking renovation projects that have famously gone arrive like the refurbishing of the reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial. And he wants to build things that really will be sort of transformative in terms of the Washington skyline like this giant triumphal arch. So suddenly people are paying attention and it is connected much more directly with politics that I've ever seen it before. - What was the first one he took on? I was trying to remember. - Well, if you go back to his first administration very late, he introduces an executive order calling for federal buildings to be traditional to be in either local traditional vernacular classical styles. - The Justin Chubo memorandum. - That's right. That goes back to the first administration. It didn't really have much effect because it came late in this term. And we were preoccupied with the pandemic and other things. But then when he arrives for his second term, he's got a lot of people who sort of know how to play the Washington game. So he puts a lot of different things all in practice, kind of all at once. The executive order on classical architecture is reupped the commission on fine arts, which is one of the main oversight bodies is stacked with his people. He takes over the Kennedy Center and makes some changes there. Probably the one that gets everybody's attention as kind of a first really big shocking thing. Is he terraced down the East Wing of the White House to make for his new ballroom? And that really was a stunner. And I think people have been paying attention much more seriously since then. - And he pitched that as the need to entertain VIPs. But I've been reading recently that he's completely twisted that. And now it's gonna be all national security all about defending the presidency from attackers. - Yes, he has a tendency to adapt the purposes of a building or policy to kind of get around the legal challenges. So originally the idea of the ballroom was one that he thought would be appealing to all Americans and presidents from either side of the political spectrum, a ballroom where you could hold these big state dinners and other events. As that came up against some legal issues like the fact that he doesn't really have the legal authority to build that without congressional approval, he's recasted as a security measure that it's going to be essentially a military facility. And that I think is fairly transparently an effort to get around the court saying, no, if you wanna build a bit new 60, 90,000 square foot volume at the White House, you need Congress to approve that. - Have there been any really successful architectural projects that he's taken on like when he was doing the reflecting pool, which is still going on, I understand. I was thinking, well, that's gotta be a slam dunk. I mean, how complicated can the reflecting pool be? What could go wrong with fixing up just a really long pool, but a lot of things have gone wrong? - Yeah, the reflecting pool is a special case. He has made some improvements to Fountains around town. He should have happened a long time ago. One of the sad things about living in Washington, D.C., is that the federal government owns a lot of our public space and the national park services in charge of keeping that up in many cases. And the park service is always fighting for budgets. They've got a lot of backlogs of maintenance all over the country, not just in Washington. And these little Fountains spread all around town will be kind of important to the neighborhood, but not necessarily big landmarks for tourists. These have been language they've fallen into, to creptitude, they're no longer functioning. He's gotten some of those running. And I think people are grateful for that. The reflecting pool seemed like it was gonna be more of the same. He was gonna go, I know a pool guy and he can fix this. - Yeah, new surface and problem solved. It turns out not to be that easy. And there's a lot more than just keeping it from leaking. There's the fact that Washington's a very hot climate that the water for the reflecting pools is generally coming out of public water sources like the Potomac River. And it's a very shallow, very hot climate and algae grows. And so it's a much more complicated problem than just the local neighborhood Fountains and it's com spectacularly wrong. And the price of these things, of course, keeps going up and up and up the longer the day goes on. - Yeah, the prices rise and oftentimes there are no bid contracts. So they're unnecessarily more money than they need to be from the beginning. And then there's not a lot of transparency about where the actual money is coming from. He often will say, oh, the public isn't gonna pay anything for this, it's gonna be donors gonna come in and pay for the ballroom. Well, that's not actually going to be the full cost of the ballroom by any means. And that price has gone up, especially as it's become taken on bigger sizes and more military functions and underground hospitals and this kind of thing. The thing that's sort of frustrating about this is that in a democracy, we would like to be able to know what the budget is and we'd like to be able to create priorities and we'd like to have some transparency about that. And there really isn't any of that. And the closest analogy I've found is living in countries where authoritarianism is well entrenched. And there's this very dispiriting thing where projects just happen, you know, building suddenly appear and building suddenly disappear. You don't really know why or who or what's going on. There's a level of kind of mystery about it all and that's certainly becoming the case in Washington as well. - Hey, you read about buildings overseas in certain countries that start off as a very ambitious project from the top. And then they just stop and sit for the next 20 years abandoned. - Yeah, I remember going to Jakarta after one of the Asian financial collapses and there were these high-rise buildings that were basically see through skeletons, just the framing and the money had run out and I was told by locals that, you know, after a certain period of time, the steel structure was no longer viable 'cause it'd been open to the elements for years of time. And so there were kind of these big hulking remnants and some ways rather haunting reminders of the instability of the economy and to center the country as well. - So aside from presidential ambitions for transforming Washington, what's happening more on the private side? What are some of the projects that you've seen around town that you really like? Well, there's been enormous change from Washington in the 27 years I've been here. I came here to write about classical music, and I remember after a concert at the Kennedy Center that got out at 10 o'clock, there was not a place to find dinner. There may be two restaurants open in the whole city. That's fundamentally different. The amount of money in town, the amount of development, there's been a huge amount of private development. There are new districts, the waterfront, the navy yard areas. These have been kind of mushroom districts. I remember going down to the waterfront and it was a couple of old warehouses and some dilapidated buildings, and suddenly that has been built kind of ex-Nilo into a very bustling vibrant, what we would call a high-rise neighborhood of 10, 12-story buildings. That's exciting. Those are interesting architects involved in that, mostly this new development goes to the firms that can kind of put out buildings quickly and efficiently. But there have been some down in that district, a wonderful architect from Canada, unfortunately who's died since name Bing Tom created a new arena stage. That's one of our local respected theater companies. It's a remarkable building, almost like a giant glass terrarium built around some existing brutalist structures, very striking building. That's one of my favorites. It is the cliche, but unfortunately I think also a bit of the truth about Washington that we're not devoid of contemporary architecture, but we don't tend to get the best of each individual or each firm's work, so I am paid work here, Marcel Breuer work here. Mies Van der Roe built the main library branch and that really was not one of Mies great buildings. But that library, which is in his classic curtain wall style, was redone by the Dutch firm Mekano and actually it's quite a spectacular building at this point. It's really worth a visit for people coming to town. What's going to happen to buildings like the HUD building and the FBI building, which are more brutalist mid-century modern buildings? I hear all kinds of things in the news like well they're going to sell them, they're going to destroy them, but what I don't hear a lot of is, and this is true elsewhere in the country, about somebody coming in and reusing them for something else. For instance, in New Haven, the former building there of the tire company, Armstrong tire, I think originally is now the hotel Marcel, which is gorgeous, and I could conceive of that maybe the FBI building could be turned into some sort of nice hotel. Is that even on the radar? I think the FBI building probably is the most universally low building in DC by the general public. I suspect that not just because of the form of the building, but because the way it was adapted over the years for security reasons, and then the way it was allowed to decline and fall into disrepair, I think there's not much hope for that building to be repurposed. Be reused. There are debates coming, and there are some very difficult things coming, rather famously there are a number of buildings from the GSA from the 1930s that have these amazing murals, Philip Gustin murals, Ben Sean murals, and the GSA wants to unload these buildings. It's not clear what's going to happen to those murals, and so that may slow things down or they may simply be destroyed, we don't really know. The classic case here is an area known as Lafam Plaza, this was built during the great decades of the 20th century when urban renewal was going on, and they took down acres and acres of historic 19th century, early 20th century brick single-family dwellings to put in these giant new government buildings. Marshal Royer is built in that district. There are some very interesting buildings formally there, but because they're all concentrated in a giant sort of super block area, it becomes hard to see how they could all be transformed without it having essentially the same urban problem, which is that it's just one giant open plaza building after another. They're not really integrated into neighborhoods that have restaurants and other amenities, so I suspect there's going to be a kind of piecemeal approach to preserving some of the important ones architecturally. There are a few that I will be happy to see go, not necessarily because of the architecture, but because they destroyed the city grid. Quite prominently is a building right opposite this Smithsonian, the main offices of the Smithsonian, the castle and the mall. It was built with a tunnel underneath connecting two volumes with something overhead, and there is one of the great views potentially in Washington from Smithsonian almost down to the Potomac river, and it just blocks that. It's been a problematic building for a long time. If one were to take that down, there would be a significant amount of new space for building actually new museums that would be contiguous. What building is that that is in the way right now? As far as all building, the James Forest all building is the one I was thinking about. Okay. The energy building, yes. Yes. It just basically blocks a view shed that is kind of important to Washington, and if it were removed, that would basically help extend the mall, kind of mirroring not perfectly, but in similar form, the way that the ellipse and the green sward up to White House, it would create a kind of north-south extension on the mall, which could be a real amenity. How is the Hirschhorn Museum doing? I hear at various times like it's under attack, and I've always thought that's one of the most beautiful museums in Washington. Yeah, now the building itself is not under attack. It was built with a garden sculpture court, and that sculpture court was done in the same style of the building, and a kind of brutalist style, if this is SOM originally. And again, it hadn't been well maintained, and the passageway from that sunken sculpture garden back into the main volume of the building was underutilized and not well designed. And so there was a big debate, and ultimately decided to do some would say surgical, some would say a little bit more than surgical, sort of renovation and rebuilding of it, and it opens fairly soon. I'm relatively hopeful that people are going to embrace this, not going to be terribly dissonant or discordant with the existing building. Okay. Are there any new modernist buildings going up around Washington now, or have they all been cancelled? No, I don't think they've been cancelled. I'm trying to think. In general, the real boom for building is coming out of the private sector at this moment. The government is in the business of sort of downsizing its federal footprint in Washington. I'm sort of interested in, you know, of this Mexican firm, ten architectos. They've built a couple buildings kind of in the center of Washington, and they are, you know, gently, not too aggressively in the modernist style that this firm does in other countries. We get a sort of, maybe it's like going into a Mexican restaurant and asking for the space to be just kept a little bit lower. It is recognizably of that firm's work, but it's not quite as prickly and bristling as it is in other places. But they've done some wonderful buildings with these kind of cantilevered overhangs and so on. And that adds to DC, I mean, the problem we have in Washington is a space in building envelope problem, so because of the site limitations, everybody wants to build out to the maximum volume of the off that they have. So you end up with a fairly relentless street face. Some years it'll be in kind of Masonry concrete, other years it'll be all glass. You don't get a lot of variation to that, and so you can end up with streets like K Street, which is famously kind of monotonous in its architecture. And this is a firm that's figured out ways to kind of break with that just to introduce a little bit more perforation and variety in the buildings exterior, and I think it looks pretty good actually. Well, last question I'll ask you about is Washington's airports. So at Washington Reagan, it seems like they've done a pretty good job of balancing the current and future needs with preserving some of the nice old features of the airport, like the original building, for instance. What I've seen recently about a Dallas, however, is it looks like they're practically wanting to rip up the whole thing. I mean, why is there a difference between those two? That's an interesting question. I haven't thought about why they're being treated differently. You know, at DCA, which is the Ronald Reagan National Airport, you're right. There is the old terminal. It's not greatly beloved by passengers because it doesn't have a lot of space for the sort of things that people want, which is mainly restaurants and shops and forms of diversion in long corridors. This is moving in that same direction. The plans that I've seen there are a lot more disturbing, however, as you point out. You know, the siren and main terminal is really one of the most extraordinary, sort of welcoming volumes you could encounter in air, but it also seems to be sweeping you into the vortex of travel with this giant, curving, concrete form. And there's some preliminary renderings that suggest they're going to build almost a second floor on top of that, and that will absolutely destroy that sense, that kind of just very powerful, light-motivic sense of welcome that the original building gives. My guess is that over time that will probably fall to the wayside. Mainly, what they want to do is just add a lot more traffic volume through Dulles. And that means more terminals and Dulles has always had what they call the people movers. Again, these are not greatly beloved by people who use them because it often means you'll fly back on a transatlantic flight or you'll come in for measure, you're completely exhausted. And the first thing that happens is you get loaded into a bus. Nobody particularly likes that. It'll be sad to see those go because there was this idea, this fantasy that they were going to literally be mobile lounges. You can imagine people sort of sitting on low modernist chairs and sofas and having a cigarette and drinking a martini as they get sort of whisked off to customs and into the main terminal. It never really functioned like that. And I think that's why that those are probably going to be in the history bit as well. One thing I've noticed is when President Trump announces some big project, you don't really know who drew it like the architects are not announcing themselves. This was true recently with Dallas that put out these great renderings, but you know, obviously United Airlines didn't do it and the White House didn't do it. So are architects hiding a little bit in these? Yeah, that's a huge topic. So you're right. The one I was thinking about recently is when Trump released designs for his presidential library. And I looked at them and I said this has got to be AI because this building cannot even stand up. And I started sort of looking at it and calculating out the volumes of it. He wanted to put a 747 in a column free space at the base of a 40 or 50 story high rise. I mean, how do you do that without an extraordinary engineering fee to put those volumes on top of one another? It was just AI slop. It was about selling the idea with a sexy looking image. So to some degree, there's that. It's just it's a developer who knows you just need an image. Yeah, there are some architects and I'm sorry to see this happen to them. There's an architect who had a pretty good reputation town named Shalom Baranis who did a mix of a lot of federal work, but a lot of other good work. And he often had fairly progressive ideas and was a kind of a good citizen in the sense of putting those ideas forth when it came to things like, you know, redeveloping existing structures and so on. He is the one who's now managing the ballroom and I don't know what this does to his reputation. I think it's a mistake for any architect to get mixed up with this at this point, but he has and we'll see where that goes. And then the other thing is that he often just chooses fairly minor architects and the theory is that they're pliable. They can kind of be hired to do the basic rendering of the initial project and then he'll bring in somebody else to kind of finish it off and do the detail work and the original architect is kind of shunted to the side, but that's fairly common. It seems as people that describe his business practices. Are there any buildings on the horizon that are being planned now that we can be looking forward to Philip? Oh, let me think. I mean, I've been so focused on the stuff that's coming out of the Trump administration. I mean, eventually one hopes that, you know, the Smithsonian has plans for expansion and probably one of the most prominent recently, relatively recent buildings was David Ajay's building for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. So if they build the Women's Museum or the Hispanic Museum, hopefully those will be two, you know, blue chip firms and they'll be a proper contest in the real effort to kind of make those worthy of the prominence that they'll have. But then again, as I said, mostly it's really in the in the private realm, you know, overlooked because it's it seems to be small, but it has a huge impact on the lives of people who live in DC is the quite extraordinary work that the district public library has done renovating or rebuilding its branches. There was a librarian here, quite a while ago named Jenny Cooper, who was faced with the problem of the Mises Vandero building, which was in a severe state of dilapidation 15, 20 years ago. It was serving as a kind of de facto social services center much more than it was a pleasant place to go and read a book. But, you know, preservationists didn't want to see them tear it down. And so it was in a kind of holding pattern for many years. And what she realized, which is a really smart combination of kind of politics and urban planning, was that it would make much more sense to rebuild all of the branches of the library, the ones that actually connect to people in their neighborhoods. And that would build the will to actually put the bigger money forward for redoing the Mises building. And that's exactly what she did. And those little libraries are quite extraordinary. Again, David Agi did two of them and they're remarkable buildings. I know he's had controversy recently, but it doesn't diminish from the quality of the buildings that were built. And then guess what? Eventually, there was enough civic will to redo the Mises Van der O building. And again, that was redone in a really wonderful fashion. Philip, thank you so much for talking with me. It's really really a pleasure. Thank you. Rick Maltese has spent over 40 years playing pianos of every kind. From the Royal York Côtels lounge to cruise ships, to Oakville's rat-packed dinner scene, and he's just released a trilogy of new jazz records with flautist Bill McBernie and bassist George Kohler. He's also a certified environmental speaker. Please welcome Rick Maltese. Hi, Rick. Hi. Thank you for having me. That's great. So before we talk about music, I want you to chat a little bit with our listeners about something that most people don't know about, which you know about, and I know about. And that is the promise of Thorium. Well, talk to me about Thorium. Well, that's funny. You mentioned that because I had two Facebook accounts that had a large following on both, but one of them got hacked. And guess why I had two? I had two because I thought a lot of my musician followers might think of a nuclear pro-nuclear musician as not worth following, like they're so anti-nuclear, right? That kind of viewpoint has changed quite a bit. There's a large number of supporters now for nuclear. And that's over over the years, I really believe in Thorium. In fact, China has created a Thorium reactor that's functioning now and it's providing energy in China. So they actually stole, they steal a lot of our ideas, American ideas, and they attended conferences here about Thorium and they ended up producing a working reactor faster than we did. Well, tell our listeners what the difference is between something they know like uranium and Thorium. Okay. Well, Thorium is a substance that is very abundant on the planet for one. So you can find it in a lot of places. In fact, America throws it out quite often. And when they do their mining, it's often found in the tailings or in whatever they leave behind. And currently, they don't recognize its value generally. So it is valuable. And places like India have started recognizing it. And even Canada at one time ran some of its reactors. We have a very advanced reactor called the Kandu here that can run on more than just uranium, can run on Thorium. And so the idea of our reactors is that they don't have to be enriched as much as the ones that they have in the United States. So they're not as dangerous as that's the big point, right? That's right. Our reactors are quite safe and has a lot of built-in safety so that they won't melt down that kind of idea. And the Thorium reactor is one of the solutions to that fear of meltdown. The idea of a Thorium reactor having liquid, it's already melted down. They say you don't have to worry about a meltdown because it already is melted down. That's because Thorium runs at high temperatures and it melts the fuel at a very high temperature. Yeah. Well, it's really a fascinating technology. And when we were doing the research on your background, it was interesting to see that you were an early advocate for this. And now it's really getting going, which is fantastic. Yeah, that's great. We're going to play this first song of yours. Tell me about if I could be anything. If I could be anything is kind of a step into my musical theater background, because I always put myself in certain scenarios that might be staged sometimes. And this seems like a love song to someone that I'm totally hooked on and feel that I want it to express how in a more naive way, kind of like a 50s, 60s feel. Yeah. More innocence. I felt that there's a space for that in our current society where everyone is a bit too exposed to sexual encounters and getting to the bottom line too quickly in relationships. So I like this idea of going through the stages of a relationship. Courtship, right? Courtship? Yeah. Courtship. Yeah, exactly. There you go. There you go. Yeah. Well, here's to work with if I could be anything. I'd be the shoes from the gods above protecting you and your little toes the way that it should be. Secret, it would be about the one you love And the one you love will certainly be me If I could be anything If I could rule the wind I'd make a well-timed chili breeze To bring you close to me And I'd act mutually If a fragrance I could be It would be enough producer Whenever you are nearer Just to need a smile upon your face Could only help the human race Be happier like me I dreamed that I could be For I could be a secret It would be about the one you love And the one you love Would certainly be me Just to be the smile upon your face Could only help the human race Be happier like me I dreamed that I could be For I could be a secret It would be about the one you love And the one you love Would certainly be me If I could rule the wind And the one you love will certainly be me If I could be anything If I could be anything If I could be anything Rick, you have put out several really cool albums Rick Maltese and Friends I think you're up to number three most recently That's right, yeah And the first one was strictly instrumental It was just bass, flute, and piano upright bass, George and Bill McBernie, George Collar on bass Bill McBernie is a wonderful flute player Both of them are excellent musicians And on the second two I started singing And funny enough, singing is fairly new in my recording career I never had the nerve to sing Up until I got hired by that You mentioned it earlier that I'm doing Oakville The Krunner Rat Pack Stuff I got hired to sing like Sinatra Or to sing his songs anyway I don't try to copy these singers I just sing them with my own voice So it was quite a learning experience To discover that I'm a good baritone I have a deep voice, almost like a bass And I'm actually, I typically lower a Sinatra song by a whole tone And it fits my voice well Rick originally wrote it for a woman to sing But since anyone can hold back the potential for growth Here's Rick with Broken Staircase When I go upstairs to my window It's a glorious view But it's a dangerous climb So I just stay here with you But you've a long, long way to go Before we climb the stairs together We could talk about repairing the stairway But I can't wait forever I'm gonna climb right up The Broken Staircase Climb right up Never should have gone down in the first place [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] You know I've tried to make it work One of us was wrong But did we both want together? Never both of us strong I'm gonna try my best without you Try to make the climb Each step I take it brings me closer Closer to the light I'm gonna climb right up The Broken Staircase Climb right up Never should have gone down in the first place I'm gonna climb The Broken Staircase Climb right up Never should have gone down in the first place I'm gonna climb right up The Broken Staircase Climb right up The Broken Staircase Climb right up Never should have gone down in the first place I'm gonna climb right up Never should have gone down in the first place Climb right up Rick, you have a background as a web developer What do you think of AI coming into the scene now for both web development and music? I think it really is quite useful for developers themselves I don't know how well it helps amateur web designers or beginner people trying to build their own website So convinced it's good for them but it's very good for myself for example Because I know HTML which is the original way you write designed websites And I paired it up with something called Frost It's a theme that is free like a theme for WordPress So when you have WordPress you can choose themes that are more friendly for the HTML experience people So one of the blocks they call them You can have an HTML block and you can add these items And I can go to Gemini for example I use Gemini, the Google AI I give it my code and say can you fix this or can you give me the CSS that makes this function the way I like And I can build my whole website much quicker Because I have the assistance of AI And I find it very useful Well we've covered the gamut today Rick from thorium to music to web development Thanks so much for coming on the show Thanks for listening US Modernist Radio is underwritten by the Brent R. Harris Charitable Trust Restore of Richard Neutra's Kaufman Desert House in Palm Springs and six other houses in California By the E. Fay Jones Conservancy preserving the legacy of modernist architecture in northwest Arkansas E. Fay Jones Conservancy.org And by Dianne Ball in the Budman family restoring significant architecture in Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu and Palm Springs Visit usmodernist.org's massive archives to listen to past shows Discover documentation of 30,000 significant modernist houses and access six million pages of classic 20th century architecture magazines US Modernist Radio is produced by soundtracks recording studios in Raleigh, North Carolina The song is performed by George Smart and Robinson Earl with guest research by Bobby Morris Got a guest to suggest for our show Writer and to Bobby at US U.S. Modernist Radio is a production of Modernist Archive Incorporated, a non-profit educational archive for the documentation, preservation, and promotion of Modernist Residential Design. I'm Tom Gild, George and I'll be back soon with another selfless, collaborative edition of U.S. Modernist Radio.