November 2025: Podcasts for People and Plants
Plus, my new essay on Bruno Munari, mapping architecture discourse, and a handful of new books that arrived in the studio.
In October, we spoke with Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby about their new book, Terremoto’s David Godshall and Kasey Toomey about designing gardens, and Workac’s Amale Andraos and Dan Wood about designing buildings for plants and people.
EDITOR’S NOTE
For Untapped Journal, I wrote a new essay on Bruno Munari, pegged to the English translation of his 1968 book, Design and Visual Communication. It’s a review that I think is relevant to Scratching the Surface listeners: it’s published by former guests Inventory Press and translated into English by Jeffrey Schnapp (we talked to him about his last Munari translation earlier this year!). But more than that, Munari is the type of designer we like to talk about around here: multidisciplinary, polymathic, prolific across scales, blending practice and theory. This book, I thought, helped explain how he was able to move between design fields so easily. I tried to place his theories on design process in dialogue to his own expansive body of work.
I’d been interested in writing about Munari for a long time. I was curious why he continues to feel so relevant, why new designers still find him compelling. The answer, I think, is in this new book. I tried to make my case in that essay. I hope you like it.
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
PAST GUESTS
Recent work, writing, and news from former guests of Scratching the Surface.
🔥 Mimi Zeiger on how California fireplaces are enduring places of communal gravity. (Untapped)
🎙️ Sursuma interviews Beatrice Galilee about her work and The World Around. (Sursuma)
📐 Federica Zambeletti on design as a transformative process. (KoozArch)
🛁 Kelsey Keith on bathing culture in San Francisco. (Culture of Bathing)
✊ Storefront for All: Whitney Mallett interviews Jose Esparza Chong Cuy about carrying the nonprofit’s founding spirit forward. (PIN-UP)
🏠 Leaky roofs, collapsed walls, mega debts: Oliver Wainwright on when Donald Judd tried architecture. (The Guardian)
👀 Jack Murphy interviews Aric Chen about his early thoughts leading the Zaha Hadid Foundation. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
😇 The most decisive year in LA’s modern history is around the corner, writes Christopher Hawthorne. Will the city meet the moment? (LA Review of Architecture)
🔌 A haunted power plant becomes a park. Michael Kimmelman wonders if this is the future? (NYT)
⚔️ When Beauty became a weapon: Aaron Betsky on how Vitruvius armed renaissance power grabs (Architect)
📆 Elvia Wilk reviews The Four Spent the Day Together, a new novel from Chris Kraus. (4Columns)
Architecture and Crime at the Louvre: Christopher Hawthorne interviews Geoff Manaugh. (PunchList)
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!
Albert Kahn, Inc - Claire Zimmerman
In Albert Kahn Inc. Claire Zimmerman provides a history of second-wave industrialization associated with the growth and development of the United States auto industry and its global footprint. Zimmerman offers a political economy of architecture; reconceptualizes the design process within a high-volume firm in dialogue with fast-paced industrial capitalism; tracks the feedback loops that industrialization introduced into architecture; and maps the unequal effects of these industrial environments on the workers who labored within them.
Rewriting Alberti - Peter Eisenman
In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space.
Gio Ponti: More than One - Manfredo di Robilant and Manuel Orazi
Gio Ponti was a giant of Italian Modernism, contributing to a multitude of fields: architecture, industrial design, furniture design, education, art criticism and publishing. From 1923 to 1930, Ponti served as the artistic director of the now cult Italian tableware manufacturer Richard Ginori. In 1928, he founded the internationally renowned magazine Domus, which, apart from a break in the 1940s, he continued to direct for the rest of his life. In the postwar era, Ponti and his associates Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli shaped the architectural image of Milan but were also active across the globe from Caracas to Tehran, Denver, Islamabad and Eindhoven.
More Than One: Gio Ponti delves into the many components of Ponti’s creative contribution to the 20th century and traces his enduring influence in Italy and across the globe.
READ/WATCHED/HEARD
Articles, books, videos, and other ephemera that caught our eye this month.
🛌 In Chicago, a soft Architecture Biennial for Hard Times. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
🖼️ How the Victoria and Albert Museum is embracing the unexpected. (NYT)
🌻 Landscape or architecture? Weiss/Manfredi blur boundaries. (NYT)
JOB WATCH
People getting new jobs in and around the design world.
Mónica Ponce de León to Conclude Her Service as Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University (Princeton SOA)
Carson Chan appointed Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki. (e-flux)
Erik L’Heureux appointed head of the school of architecture at Monash University. (e-flux)
POSTSCRIPT
Last month, over at The Architect’s Newspaper, Kyle Miller wrote about a diagram he produced mapping architecture discourse (above). Here at Scratching the Surface, we’re always swooning over new diagrams — especially around writing and criticism. On his Substack, On Architecture, David Perrine responded with a critique outlining the limitations of Miller’s diagram and in so doing, shared even more historical diagrams, all of which are fun to pour over. The entire debate is worth a read. I’m wondering, now, if we could do the same for graphic design?
