7 AM, Saturday, March 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org

We live with the outsides of everyone else’s buildings. The bulk and size is often what we notice most, but what materials are used: their color, contrast, or banality is impossible to avoid: and exteriors have changed over the last generation because materials have changed…

Have you noticed them? Whether it’s stick-frame-over-podium buildings (above, left) or conventional midrises (right), facades are now canvases for the shallowest of decoration. While most single-family homes are still wrapped in stock siding in imitation of old-timey shingles and clapboards, these new facades have one critical difference: the rejection of past precedent.

The agent of this change is a new generation of siding materials: “cladding,” “rain screens,” “ventilating facades,” and the newest versions of paint: “acrylic/urethane/silicone/elastomeric” coatings. Architects can’t avoid the relentless, full-court press from product manufacturers, and this new exterior window-dressing now extends to the wide use of “exterior cladding consultants,” who shoulder the liability of the architect’s ignorance of these products.

Joining us on DESIGN NOW are architect, writer and historian Mark Hewitt, architect, professor and maker Lindsay Suter, and architect Jay Brotman of FCA architects, formerly known as Svigals and Partners in New Haven: who create beauty while others make what we see all around us,

7 AM, Saturday, February 7, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org

Everyone of us are directly confronted the fact of sacred space – it’s encounter, appreciation, even creation. Some places are more than accommodation: and many of those spaces are not “religious” by design. Designers labor to create Sacred Space, but we are often moved beyond coherent understanding by places that touch us.

The natural, the experienced, the discovered are all around us. For designers it is too easy to use icons, rituals or culture to define what is designated “spiritual”: – but where do YOU find sacred place?

DESIGN NOW! Brings in people who have found themselves living lives that find and live in sacred space: in religion, in life, in our humanity.

7 AM, Saturday, January 3, 2026 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org

There is political urgency in the Housing Crisis: There is academic fascination with Urban Design: There is popular cultural obsession with Community Building.

But the basic directions of how we make places to live together have often been based on road layout, zoning codes and the vision of those who are either “planners”, ‘designers”, real estate developers, politicians or activists: all trying to capture a cultural vision: but how do any of those think of outcomes?

The framing of our social aesthetics is so complicated in realization that its easy to lose the essential vision of why some of us want to design a future – versus simply accept cultural evolution without design: What do we value? What do we want? Do we encourage? discourage? prohibit? require?

Beyond pretty 2D renders and site plans- what do those thinking about our collective future see as our future living together?

Three world thought leaders in how we form community join DESIGN NOW. Sarah Bronin is an architect, educator and spearheaded a huge revision in Connecticut’s State Zoning Regulations. Yodan Rofe is an Israeli professor and urban design authority, Andres Duany is an architect and urban designer and was one of the creators of New Urbanism, and has participated in the creation of over 300 communities.