Virtual Memories Show:
Witold Rybczynski –
Thru’ These Architect’s Eyes
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“An architect doesn’t build something just because he wants to build it. But as a writer, you can say, ‘I have an idea for a book.'”
Witold Rybczynski joins the show to talk about architecture! The renowned writer, scholar, and former architect discusses his newest book, How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit
“There was an enormous excitement about concrete in the early 20th century.”
We also talk about the joys of architecture school, why he got out of the practice, the farthest he’s ever traveled to see a building, how he got started as a writer, his favorite period for American architecture, and how architectural criticism differs from that of other forms (and why it’s a pointless exercise)!
“[The impact of digital technology on teaching and practicing architecture] is like reinventing the English language. You know what a disaster Esperanto was.”
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About our Guest
Witold Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh, of Polish parentage, raised in London, and attended Jesuit schools in England and Canada. He studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught for twenty years. He is Emeritus Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Rybczynski has designed and built houses as a registered architect, as well as doing practical experiments in low-cost housing, which took him to Mexico, Nigeria, India, the Philippines, and China. He has written for the Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, and has been architecture critic for Saturday Night, Wigwag, and Slate. From 2004 to 2012 he served on the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts. His most recent book is How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit
He lives with his wife Shirley Hallam in an old stone house, the Icehouse, in Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. He says, “I don’t think of myself as someone with hobbies — I garden under pressure — but the artifacts I’ve owned for longest are well-used hand-tools. I don’t collect anything, but I have a lot of books.” He is on Twitter at @witoldr.
Credits: This episode’s music is I’m Goin’ Home by The Rolling Stones (because Witold wrote the book, Home
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. Rybczynski by me.
(Other Press). We also discuss the confluence and divergence of love and happiness, her surprise when 
(Knopf, 2008). Her newest book is 
. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Ms. Reza by 
, explores her family’s fractured history against the backdrop of 20th century Yugoslavia. We talk about how she left her country in 1990 only to find that it wasn’t there when she went back. We also explore the risks and challenges of researching a terrorist organization, the comics tradition in Yugoslavia and her own comics history, Serbia’s culture of friendship, why the 
, the perils of too much stippling, why it was controversial to publish Fatherland in Serbian dialect in Croatia, and more.
digital recorder (because there was a power supply problem that caused a weird reverb on my main recorder). The intro and outro were recorded on a 
, but we found out that we had a lot more to talk about. So much, in fact, that we ran over the time set up by her publisher and had to get together for a second session during her stay in New York for PEN America week! In part 1 of our first 2-part episode, Linn talks about the influences of her parents — Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman — on her storytelling process, her subversion of the “Scandinavian crime novel” in The Cold Song, the importance of place in her writing, the perils of overthinking the ground rules for an interview (not ours!), how she transposed a character from The Wire from Baltimore to Norway, and how she managed to convince her book club to tackle Proust. We close out with the topic of Karl Ove Knausgard’s work and the ethics of explicitly writing fiction from life (which is where part 2 picks up). Ms. Ullmann’s a fascinating writer and this is (this first half of) an illuminating conversation about her work and life. 
(1998), 
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(Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to show to talk about the many notions of “home” for black people. Along the way, we talk about the many notions of what constitutes a black person. As Ms. Raboteau discovered in the travels chronicled in her book — encompassing Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and America’s deep south — there are a lot of ideas about who’s black and what blackness means.
(Henry Holt, Picador), and a work of creative nonfiction, 
, out this week from Doubleday Books.
(2008), 
(2010) and 
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into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by