October 2025: New Episodes and Reflections on the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Plus 10 years of Wilson's Republic, Mitch Goldstein's studio practice, and a peek inside Virgil Abloh's archive

In September we kicked off our new season with a back-to-school episode featuring New School President Joel Towers and an episode thinking about the future with futures designer Nick Foster.

EDITOR’S NOTE

After taking our annual summer sabbatical, I’m excited that Scratching the Surface is back with new episodes! I always love releasing these first few episodes of a new season as I think of them as setting the tone for the upcoming episodes and as a way to open up new lines of dialogue and engagement.

We kicked off the season with a special back-to-school episode with the president of The New School, Joel Towers. Towers is trained as an architect and spent the last twenty years teaching (and then serving as dean) of The New School’s Parsons School of Design before his appointment of the university’s tenth president. We have, I think, a wide-ranging conversation about the state of higher education and how his career in design — and teaching design — influences his role now as running an institution like The New School. Our second episode is with the self-described “futures designer” Nick Foster, centered around his new book, Could Should Might Don’t. After working as a designer, most recently leading the design team at Google X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory, Foster grew dissolutioned with how we talk about the future. His book gives us new ways to think about how we talk about the future and makes the case for a more rigorous conversation around how we build the futures we want. I know this conversation will set up many future episodes.

In the middle of these new episodes, I took a quick trip to Chicago to see the opening of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Led by a former guest, Florencia Rodriguez, this year’s theme Shift: Architecture in Times of Change, provided a framework for all sorts of interesting work across the built environment, research, and artistic practice. It was nice to meet some former guests like Florencia, Christopher Hawthorne, and Sam Jacob as well as chat with some possible future guests (!!). I connected with old friends and made some new ones. I’ll be writing more about the show over the next few months. I’m excited that Scratching the Surface is an official media partner for the Biennial and we’ll be releasing a series of episodes featuring participants in the show over the next few months. Look for those episodes across this season!

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 our recent conversation with Mitch Goldstein — 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.

Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay recommend books that shape our sense of place

Their new book, Roadkill, explores the various impacts of our dependency on cars.

10 Years of Wilson’s Republic

James Dyer talks with the founders of Wilson’s Republic, a creative community in Northern England as they celebrate ten years of events, gatherings, and talks.

PAST GUESTS

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

🎨 Christopher Hawthorne thinks a world reshaped by AI needs museums more than ever. (NYT)

💵 How Elvia Wilk become Elvia, Incorporated. (Cleavland Review of Books)

🤔 Keller Easterling: Maybe Something More Like Disposition. (e-flux)

🔬 A new short story from Geoff Manaugh about celestial detectors, space, and weighing lives from below. (e-flux)

👏 Congratulations to James Voorhies on the launch of Spritz3000, a new curatorial studio based in the Catskills. (Spritz3000)

🪻 Spencer Bailey profiles garden designer Piet Oudolf to coincide with the opening of Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens. (Elle Decor)

🎡 Flushing Meadows-Corona Park needs huge repairs, writes Justin Davidson. How do we think big without tunring it into a gentrification magnet? (New York)

🏠 Jack Cheng edits a short film on a Pacific Northwest house designed by Christopher Alexander. (YouTube)

🪑 Glenn Adamson interviewed Robert Wilson, who died on July 31 at age 83, about his chair designs. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

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!

Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect by Despina Stratigakos and Elana Shapira

The first biography of Ella Briggs, the unconventional architect, designer, and writer who designed modernist houses in Austria, was jailed as a suspected spy in Mussolini’s Italy, and thrived in Weimar Germany before fleeing the Nazis to London. Despite a long and prolific career, her name is largely forgotten today. Finding Ella Briggs restores Briggs to her rightful place in the history of modernist design.

Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

In 2023, Cory Doctorow coined a few that immediately captured what it feels like to be alive today. Enshittification described how everything on the internet seemed to be getting worse. Now expanded into a book, Doctorow moves the conversation beyond the overwhelming sense of our inevitably enshittified fate. He shows us the specific decisions that led us here, who made them, and—most important—how they can be undone.

The Design Comedy by Otto Von Busch

In this paraphrase of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Otto von Busch, a pitiful design professor, searches for the design workshop at Parsons. Proving inaccessible, the lost professor falls into despair. However, a recently fired workshop technician, Virgil, appears to know the way. They descend the crumbling corridors of design’s collapse, through the ruins and anguish of broken promises, failed research, self-absorbed design theorists and hypocritical designers, to the very nadir of design’s inferno.

READ/WATCHED/HEARD

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

💔 Remembering John Morgan (1973-2025), a designer and typographer dedicated to the arts. (Wallpaper)

🪚 Thoughts on “A Pattern Language,” from a trained architect and seasoned woodworker. (Untapped)

💥 Chris Dercon is known for dramatic gestures and frequent moves between major institutions. But he says he’ll be at the Fondation Cartier for the long haul. (NYT)

🪴 In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a dynasty comes home. (The New Yorker)

🚌 Theaster Gates’s The Land School opened on September 14th in Chicago. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

🗺️ A diagram of three decades of architectural Projects by Kyle Miller sets the stage for provoking contemporary discourse. (The Architect’s Newspaper)

🏆 Vincent Scully Prize 2025 goes to historian and former MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll. (Archinect)

🎨 Glenn Lowrey left MoMA smarter, richer and at a crossroads. (NYT)

JOB WATCH

People getting new jobs in and around the design world.

Hugh Miller joins Pentagram as Partner in the London office. (Pentagram)

Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, is retiring after a 26-year tenure. (NYT)

POSTSCRIPT

Last month, GQ published a new package, The Virgil Abloh Archive, that looks at the personal artifacts from the late designer’s home, office, and studio. From prototypes for unreleased products to his personal collection of Raf Simons jackets, the collection is a revelatory peak inside the polymathic designer’s creative process. As a lover of archives, my only complaint is that they didn’t feature more items!