Virtual Memories Show 624: Witold Rybczynski
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“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.”
With his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski 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‘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! And go read THE DRIVING MACHINE!
(And listen to our 2015, 2019, and lockdown conversations!)
“If you write about architecture, you’re going to wind up writing about architects.”
“When you get to my age, you think about the past much more than the future. You have a limited future, but you have a long past.”
“You can make a drawing a better explanation than a photograph.”
“If you live a long life, you realize you’ve lived a life no one has lived.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Witold Rybczynski is an architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of twenty-two books, including the best-selling Home, Charleston Fancy, and The Story of Architecture. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. He lives in Philadelphia.
Listen to our 2015, 2019, and lockdown conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Witold’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Witold by David Graham; other ones by me. It’s on my instagram.