December 2025: The Invention of Design, The Intelligence of Water, The Venice Biennale

This month we had conversations about design history and architectural intelligence and published stories about experimental graphic design and what we can learn from water.

In November, we spoke with writer and designer Maggie Gram about the intellectual history of design and architect and curator Carlo Ratti about the Venice Biennale.

EDITOR’S NOTE

On Thanksgiving day, in a moment of escape before sitting down to dinner, I stepped outside and looked at my phone where I saw that Robert A.M. Stern had died at 86. I interviewed Stern in 2022, following the release of his memoir, Between Memory and Invention. I’d always been more interested in Stern the character than his buildings and the book was illuminating to me in thinking about an alternative career for himself rooted in curation, writing, and criticism. I wanted to have him on the show to talk about that: how did his interest in history, how did his work writing books, how did his early career as a curator shape the buildings that would come later. I think we got to some interesting places in our conversation but my favorite moment — and one of my favorite moments in all StS history was the last fifteen minutes where I asked him about martinis (I had noticed martinis were a constant presence in his book). We compared notes on how we took our drinks and he talked about why he switched to vodka for a period of time. He loved architecture, he loved history, he also loved martinis. RIP, Bob.

If there is a connecting thread between the two conversations I had on the show this month it’s an attempt to ask and answer the question about the role of design in this moment. In my conversation with Maggie Gram, the author of perhaps my favorite new design book of the year, we talk about how design has been defined and redefined over the last century; making the case for a new way to think about and approach design today. And then with Carlo Ratti, who I spoke to as he was wrapping up the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, we talk about how architecture can be a meeting spot for various forms of intelligences, domain expertise, and forms of knowledge. In both conversations, design is presented as a method of connecting: of putting people in contact with others, of seeding ideas into a public, of creating communities. (I think often of another biennial, actually, Hashim Sarkis’s 2021 Biennale called “How We Live Together”. That, to me, is still the question designers should be asking.)

We have a few more episodes this year before we take a little break until January. I’m currently planning the next slate of episodes: what would you want to hear more of? what conversations should we be staging? I’d love to know! And as always, 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 — like this month’s conversation with designer and researcher Julia Watson — 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.

How Berlin-based A—Z Made Space for Experimental Graphic Design

A conversation between Freek Lomme and Anja Lutz about A—Z, a space for experimental graphic design, and the new book documenting the first five years of exhibitions!

PAST GUESTS

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

🪦 Robert A.M. Stern, architect who reinvented prewar splendor, dies at 86. (NYT)

🏙️ Perhaps his final interview: Robert A.M. Stern is still dreaming of a fresh New York. (NYT)

✏️ ’A Portal to Possibilities’: Hans Ulrich Obrist on his new memoir, Life In Progress. (Frieze)

🤺 Here are two reviews of Harlem’s new Studio Museum building by David Adjaye: Michael Kimmelman liked it. Justin Davidson did not. (NYT/Curbed)

🎨 Once Hated, Now Loved: Michael Kimmelman on the makeover at Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist Behemoth. (NYT)

👎 Christopher Hawthorne, on the otherhand, is unimpressed by the new Sotheby’s at the Breuer. (Punchlist)

🔥 Paul Ford makes the argument for letting AI burn it all down. (Wired)

👶 Finnish-style baby boxes get a New York Twist: Alexandra Lange on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to offer citywide baby boxes. (CityLab)

📚 Carson Chan thinks you should add these ten essential new design books to your holiday wish list. (Cultured)

🪄 Aaron Betsky remembers Lars Lerup (1940-2025), the trickster who taught architecture to see its own sprawl. (Architect)

🛁 Oliver Wainwright reviews Eric Owen Moss’s “conceptual rod” of the 708 House at the Venice Biennale. (NYRA)

❓New David Adjaye-Built Museums begs the question: Kate Wagner asks what happened to #metoo? (Art in America)

🫀Sam Jacob on the art of the ventilation shaft. (ArtReview)

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!

Speak Data by Georgia Lupi and Phillip Cox

From Pentagram Partner Georgia Lupi and strategist Phillip Cox comes the first pop nonfiction book to explore the definition of data, especially as it applies to business, tech, medicine, psychology, health, art, and more. Beautifully illustrated (of course), Lupi and Cox present data as a vocabulary that anyone can use.

The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe by Steven Hurtt and James Tice

This massive book describes the ideas developed by Colin Rowe and his students at Cornell, where he taught from 1963 to 1999. Rowe is one of those figures I’ve come across peripherally but admittedly never read directly. This book has proven to be a good introduction — from the simple urban design techniques to philosophical ideas about form — and shows why he’s considered so influential to architecture theory.

Plugin House by People’s Architecture Office

Part monograph, part manifesto for a new age of architecture, Plugin House presents projects from design studio People’s Architecture Office that show examples of innovative, sustainable and community-driven solutions to the global housing crisis. Blending essays, personal stories and a mini-graphic novel, the book explains the barriers to accessible housing and potential ways to overcome them.

READ/WATCHED/HEARD

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

😳 Director of Philadelphia Art Museum is dismissed after unpopular rebranding. (NYT)

😰 Dismissed Philadelphia Art Museum Director fires back with a lawsuit. (Hyperallergic)

😍 Donald Judd’s Architecture Office brings his vision back to life. (PIN-UP)

🪻The King of Perennials: An interview with Piet Oudolf. (PIN-UP)

🤔 Why design studios are making their own fonts. (It’s Nice That)

❤️ Outland is a new forum for criticism and education. Count us excited to see where this goes! (Outland)

👏 Speaking of the Venice Biennale, Wang She and Lu Wenyu were appointed curators of the 2027 Architecture Biennale. (La Biennale)

JOB WATCH

People getting new jobs in and around the design world.

Nieuwe Instituut appoints Yesomi Umolu as new General and Artistic Director. (Nieuwe Instituut)

Fashion Institute of Technology appoints Jason Schupbach as next president. (MR)

Daniel Weiss, the former President and CEO of the Met Museum in New York will take over as director of the Philadelphia Art Museum (WHYY)

Rob Giampietro joins Amazon as a Sr. Principal Product Designer on the Applied AI Solutions team. (LinkedIn)

POSTSCRIPT

I’ve enjoyed reading the reviews of the Sotheby’s redesign of Marcel Breuer’s old Whitney building by Herzog & de Meuron (see above links!). I’ve probably written in this newsletter before of my love for that building — the first New York museum I ever visited, when I was a senior in high school on a photography class field trip. I admittedly don’t remember the exhibition we were there to see but that building got lodged in my brain, specifically, for some reason, the stairs.

Even though I worked at the Whitney for a short time — only after it moved to its new location downtown — the Breuer building continues to be The Whitney for me. I was surprised to discover Michael Grave’s 1980 proposal to expand the museum, surrounding Breuer’s structure with a postmodern collage of styles. I don’t know how I’d never seen this proposal before but it’s torn my heart between my loyalty to Breuer’s building and my enduring, unexplainable love for postmodernism.