Dan and Greg interview Matt Nardella, founder of Moss Design, a Chicago design-build firm with an array of residential and commercial projects, and a bent for nudging clients and neighbors toward sustainability in small, but meaningful increments.

Interviewee: Matt Nardella

Intro / Outro: “Highway Chile”, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

Discussed:

• NewSchool of Architecture San Diego

• Architects as developers, contractors and multi-disciplinary designers

• In praise of not designing projects on a spreadsheet (and finding the gray zones of zoning)

• Credit due to:

o Ted Smith > The Red Office

o Jonathan Segal

• Architect, Know (and Sell) Thyself!

• The SCI-ARC Blowout

• Ending brute-force office culture > how to not “punch down”

• “We (architects) should be interviewing them (developers)”

• Monocultures of design making people sick and unhappy?

• Nightingale Housing, Melbourne - Jeremy McLeod and Maria Yanez

• You don’t need to spend more money to achieve sustainability – you just need to seriously undertake site analysis and translate that into a building, while thinking like a builder and the client – or being both, potentially.

• Want to build? Blog first!

• “Granny flats” are back in Chicago and the city is building 9,000 new units in the West Looop – will that help the housing crisis?

• On being a “bike warrior”

• Are people in happy countries just driving less?

• Vision Zero

• The best way to make an argument for bike commuting is to just do it

• Park(ing) Day