KCRW: DnA: Recent Episodes
KCRW: DnA
KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture explores who and what matters in our designed world – on air, online and at public events. Host Frances Anderton talks to designers, users and experts about products, fashion, buildings and more, in Los Angeles and beyond –revealing how we shape today’s world and how it shapes us.
So often architecture is associated with high price custom homes and fancy institutional buildings.
But many designers are also helping shape the city with pro bono work for nonprofits in less affluent neighborhoods. One in the news recently is the Campus For At-Risk Children in Watts being designed by Frank Gehry.
And unveiled Saturday – with a celebratory Thanksgiving meal — is Mobile Village: Kitchen, designed by LA architect Deborah Richmond for Peace4Kids, a nonprofit for foster kids located at Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club in South LA.
KCRW's Frances Anderton and Steve Chiotakis discussed the project and its ambitious goals.
Berliners are facing many of the same challenges as Angelenos in terms of affordable living space, as well as coming to grips with changing family structure; but, they have come up with an intriguing solution. Baugruppen, meaning building groups, are cohousing communities where you choose who you want to live alongside and then split the costs of development.
We visited a Baugruppe complex in Berlin called R50 designed by architecture firms Heide & Von Beckerath and IFAU. Co-principals Christoph Schmidt and Verena von Beckerath explained the process of designing and building collaboratively -- for 19 households.
DnA spoke also spoke with art and design writer Andreas Toelcke about the origins of Baugruppen in Berlin and discussed the model’s feasibility in Los Angeles with architects Rick Abramson and Rick Corsini -- with reference to Gregory Ain’s classic Avenel Cooperative Housing.
While in Berlin, DnA’s producer Caroline Chamberlain visited the world’s first board game cafe called Spielwiese. She met with the designers of some games dealing with some very German challenges.
“Cool am Pool” is a board game coming soon by Hartwig Jakubik that has players compete over the best places by the pool. Caroline learns how it works and whether it is rooted in a German vacation tradition.
25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, fictionalizing the Cold War in pop culture is on the rise with the TV shows “The Americans” and “Deutschland 83.” And now a two-player board game called is taking on the theme. “Wir Sind Das Volk” -- meaning “We Are The People,” the rallying cry of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall -- was created by native West German Peer Sylvester.
Caroline Chamberlain spoke to Sylvester about how he turned the ideological struggle between East and West into a game and why players can choose not to build the Berlin Wall.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s first L.A. commission, the Hollyhock House, opens once more to the public after a lengthy restoration. Alan Hess, an architect and preservationist who has written five books on Frank Lloyd Wright, talks about why he can’t wait for the building’s opening and what we can learn from Frank Lloyd Wright today.
Everything Talks let us know what our objects really think. In this episode Tom Saunders channels a paper and a Wholefoods reusable bag bickering over who killed the plastic bag. Shockingly, however, "plasty" makes a comeback.
Huntington Beach approved a reusable bag ordinance last month. Channel 2 reports, while many agree with the goal to cut down on the 123 thousand tons of discarded plastic bags in the state every year, a lot of residents in HB are hot under the collar that the ban wasn’t put on the ballot. They say if the city is worried about the beaches, they should be banning diapers, fast food containers, water bottles and cans.