{"id":17341,"date":"2025-02-05T16:06:03","date_gmt":"2025-02-05T21:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=17341"},"modified":"2025-02-05T16:06:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T21:06:06","slug":"episode-624-witold-rybczynski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-624-witold-rybczynski","title":{"rendered":"Episode 624 – Witold Rybczynski"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 624: Witold Rybczynski<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_624_-_Witold_Rybczynski.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“As an architect, if you write about buildings, you don’t just write about what they look like, but how they work, the plans, how they’re built, how they function. But most books about cars focus on the styling, not all the other aspects, and that’s what I wanted to get at.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>With his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car<\/a> (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski<\/a> explores how cars evolved from their earliest days through the befuddling styles of today’s EVs. We get into the design language of cars and how it had no true precedent, why European styles were so different and varied than America’s, his favorite era for car design, and the differences between writing about cars and writing about buildings. We talk about the cars in his life and how he integrated them into The Driving Machine<\/em>‘s narrative (including the Mercedes that lasted him 25 years), the lives of the engineers & car-company founders he explored for the book, what he learned by drawing the book’s car-illustrations himself, and how drawing all those cars brought him back to his youth. We also discuss the new book he’s writing about his dissatisfaction with contemporary architecture, how it resulted from a Chat-GPT ‘hallucination,’ the cycles of architecture & the death of architecture criticism, the (sorta) imaginary house he designed for himself, and more. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read THE DRIVING MACHINE<\/a>!<\/p>\n

(And listen to our 2015<\/a>, 2019<\/a>, and lockdown<\/a> conversations!)<\/em><\/p>\n

“If you write about architecture, you’re going to wind up writing about architects.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n