Aaron Betsky on why architects should stop building (and reuse instead).

Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Aaron Betsky is a US-based writer, educator and critic, who has served as director of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, as well as a curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

He has also written over 20 books with subjects ranging from Zaha Hadid, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Dutch architecture practice MVRDV to the relationship between architecture and same-sex desire.

He is about to publish another. Don’t Build, Rebuild: The Case for Imaginative Reuse in Architecture implores the construction industry to refrain from doing what it does most – building – and, instead, find new ways to use the materials and stock we already possess.

In this episode, we talk about: the trauma of election day in the US; how we can reuse buildings imaginatively and effectively; working with relics of the industrial age; why the digital world is changing the architect’s role; making spaces more egalitarian; squatting; what architects can learn from artists; urban mining; taking inspiration from music festivals; hanging out in the legendary Studio 54; the importance of loft living; and much, much more.

(This episode was recorded on election day in the US.)

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