August 2025: Cranbrook Month! Plus, New York's Earth Room and Design Collections

Last month, we shared two interviews with former Cranbrook designers-in-residences.

We’re taking the summer off from new episodes but in July we shared two old favorites: our 2023 episode with architect and RCA dean Adrian Lahoud and our 2023 conversation with former designer-in-residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art Kathleen McCoy.

EDITOR’S NOTE

And somehow we are already into August. Where did the summer ago? I’m already back to prepping for classes for the new semester and deep into planning our new season of episodes. The first few episodes are mapped out and I’m researching the guests to prep for the conversations. I’m excited by the lineup and can’t wait to have these conversations. As I’ve been trying to do, I hope this new season will help expand the conversations both about what we do on Scratching the Surface and also how we talk about design.

Until then, you can find some old favorite episodes we rebroadcasted this month and some new stories over on our publishing platform Scratch. Below, you’ll find links, news, and media from former guests and other design news.

If you like what we do here and want to support us, you can upgrade your subscription for just $5/month or $50/year. Paid members get bonus interviews each month and help keep the show free for everyone, all the time. Thanks for listening.

See you next month,
Jarrett

SCRATCH

Recent essays, interviews, and stories published on our Scratch platform.

Design Stories: New Perspectives on a Collection by James Dyer

James Dyer reviews a new book asks what design is and how design museums can address this question through their collections.

PAST GUESTS

Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.

⛪️ Justin Davidson on the right way to convert a church into a condo. (Curbed)

💸 DOGE wants to replace our institutions with a tech utopia. Mike Pepi says it won’t work. (The Guardian)

🤑 Kate Wagner reviews Incorporating Architects, a new book that interrogates how architecture as a practice portrays, theorizes, and reproduces itself. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

🤝 Let’s Los Angelize L.A., writes Dana Cuff and Christopher Hawthorne. (Los Angeles Times)

🧪 ”Let there be no end to experimentation:” Domus interviews Aric Chen about his new role as director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation. (Domus)

✍️ Michael Bierut on drawing every day for 100 days. (It’s Nice That)

🕚 Slow and Steady: An Interview with The Slowdown’s Spencer Bailey. (PIN-UP)

BOOK ROUNDUP

Recent books that have arrived in the studio. All links are Bookshop.org affiliate links. If you order through Bookshop, we get some money to help support the show!

Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US

We already featured this book in our members-only interview with Andrew Blauvelt but the full, physical copy just showed up in the studio. This expansive document, based on a show currently on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum, significantly expands how we think about mid-century modern design and its influence on contemporary practice.

The Iconic Tropical House by Patrick Bingham-Hall

This illustrated volume presents forty-five of the most interesting tropical houses of the last fifty years, surveying India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and northern Australia. Bingham-Hall sets the houses in context, arguing that climate, colonization, and modernism, as well as geopolitical events, increasing prosperity, and even air-conditioning since the end of World War II, have created a very specific set of circumstances and therefore houses. The Iconic Tropical House makes the case that this is architecture that's inherently environmentally attuned and innately sustainable.

The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram

Maggie Gram’s excellent n+1 essay on design thinking a few years ago quickly became an annual read for me as I assign it to my students every semester. She’s now expanded that essay — and her themes — in this twentieth-century history of design. This is one of those books I’m surprised hasn’t been written before!

READ/WATCHED/HEARD

Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.

😱 The Eames Institute acquires Lars Müller Publishers, signalling a “new chapter” for the Swiss publishing house. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

🪦 Jim Parkinson, Logo Artist in Print’s Glory Days, Dies at 83. (NYT)

📸 Wolfgang Tillman’s latest Paris Exhibition is a Paean to the Pompidou. (PIN-UP)

🕑 The Swiss Railways Clock that still keeps travelers on time. (NYT)

📕It’s telling how telling a telling can be: designer Luiza Dale on footnotes and marginalia. (Are.na)

JOB WATCH

People getting new jobs in and around the design world.

Ramon Amaro is appointed Design Academy Eindhoven’s new creative director. (DAE)

After four years leading the Museum of Contemporary Art, Johanna Burton will next head the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia. (NYT)

POSTSCRIPT

My favorite thing that I read this month was the obituary for Bill Dilworth, the caretaker of the New York Earth Room — a Soho lost filled with dirt made by Walter De Maria — who died earlier this year at 70. I, unfortunately, never made it to the Earth Room when I lived in New York but for some reason I found this obituary profoundly moving. “The Earth Room had a few caretakers before Mr. Dilworth took it on in 1989. But no one was as committed to the mission as he was: He considered the job as urgent as that of a lighthouse keeper,” writes Penelope Green. “He watered and raked the soil, plucking the odd weed or mushroom. (The mushrooms were edible, and delicious, by Mr. Dilworth’s account.) The work allowed him, he said, “to settle into the art world in a way that was personal and comfortable and meaningful.”