A Lot You Got to Holler is dead! For our last episode, we look ahead to Chicago architecture and urbanism to come: The Obama Library! 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial! Neoliberalism! Ben lets us in on how Uber but for architecture will work in the utopian future. (It's actually not terrible, we promise!). Zach looks back on his own checkered past…

It's a pretty wild time to be a historic preservationist, what with burgeoning preservation movements centered on building styles that few folks are sure they really like. (We're talking PoMo here.) As such, Lisa DiChiera takes us on a tour of all the Chicago buildings on Landmarks Illinois' 2017 list of most endangered places in the state before t…

Katherine Darnstadt's architecture firm Latent Design creates objects and urban systems, but it's biggest victories have come from pulling the upstream policy levers that set the context for what architecture can achieve. In her chat with Ben and Zach, Katherine comes out in favor of "extreme vetting" for architects, and how to structure your firm …

Edgar Miller is perhaps the most overlooked artist in the Chicago canon. Art was everywhere and everything to Miller, who used the city as his canvas through painting, woodworking, stained glass, sculpture, printmaking, iron working, industrial design and whatever materials fell his way. His expressionist, bespoke approach to design, art and archit…

Now that a native New Yorker real estate agent is our president-elect, cities finally have the pro-urbanism voice in the White House they need! Right? NO EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE. How terrible? We ask Chicago urban policy ace Daniel Kay Hertz (@danielkayhertz) to explain how far the toilet we've flushed. Special thanks to recording engineer Tim Joyce…

For A Lot You Got to Holler's first election season special, co-hosts Zach Mortice and Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman visit the totalitarian and poorly described world of Agenda 21, a book written by Glenn Beck, a conservative commentator known for his full heart, clear eyes, and tear-streaked cheeks; and Harriet Parke, a nurse of some literary…

For A Lot You Got to Holler’s first-ever live podcast, we shined a light on the most hidden and obscured element of urbanism that’s changing how we interact with cities in every way: data. Invisible streams of 1’s and 0’s pour out of our transit systems, buildings, and utility infrastructure, and into our smartphones, giving us a more dynamic look …

The A Lot You Got to Holler Cavalcade of Firsts continues, when co-hosts Zach Mortice and Ben Schulman sit down with Ernie Wong of Site Design Group--the show's first ever landscape architect guest! On the agenda: shared streets in Uptown, Chicago's many, many basket-case ruins and slag pits, and an oft-overlooked question: Is shutting down the Dan…

Architecture is concert halls, museums, theaters, and all of our temples of high culture. But it's also train stations, sewer drains, and the seemingly anonymous infrastructure that makes the city work. Few architects understand how to elevate this everyday machinery of urbanism as well as Chicago's own Carol Ross Barney. She chats with Newcity des…

The neighborhood of Pullman on Chicago's far South Side is a crucible of architectural, labor, industrial, and civil rights history. It's also a national monument, with big plans for renovation and redevelopment on the horizon. Commissioned by railroad magnate George Pullman in 1880 and designed by Solon Beman, Pullman was an idyllic workers utopia…

Architecture requires massive amounts of money, time, and effort to come together. It's serious business. Most of the time. But here in Chicago there are a handful of designers that work humor into their architecture whenever they can, as a way to satirize the practice of architecture and the cultures that surround it, or as a way to invite new peo…

Chicago's most valuable natural asset is its lakefront, forever free, public, and protected by law. This lakefront is so valuable, argues the architects at Port Urbanism, that we need more of it to pay off the city's massive debts. Or (if you ask the designers at UrbanLab) newly built islands in the lake must be drafted into relieving pressure from…

Depending on who's telling the tale, the Cabrini-Green housing projects on Chicago's Near North Side are either patient-zero for urban dysfunction and decay, or a humble high-rise utopia, Corbusier's Radiant City with soul. But at the end of the day it was home to 15,000 people. Cabrini-Green was mostly demolished by 2011, but its legacy both haunt…

From the 80s to the 90s, movies set and filmed in Chicago showed a city cleaving itself in half. From John Hughes suburban-kid-in-the-city hijinks to the near apocalyptic urban horror of Candyman and Child's Play, these 20 years of film reflected the straining inequalities of the city that produced them. Newcity Design Editor Ben Schulman and Chica…