As many arts journalists and critics lament, the field of cultural journalism has diminished. Those who have been spared from newspaper and magazine budget cuts find themselves competing for column inches, while others have been forced to strike out on their own. For some, podcasts have become a sort of safe haven: those with an entrepreneurial spirit and access to a decent microphone can embark on telling the stories that traditional media have axed. For good reason, then, podcasting has grown: According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of American listeners over age 12 who have listened to a podcast in the past month has grown from 9% in 2008 to 42% in 2023. The International Advertising Bureau predicts that the podcast-creator economy will double over the next three years, based on advertiser surveys.
It’s good news for creators and listeners alike, especially in an industry like architecture, where media coverage has been slimming down over the past decade. In this field, podcasting presents an opportunity to communicate with multiple audiences—the general public, other design professionals, and even clients—on issues such as theory, professional practice, education, and more. Two design-specific podcasts, The Second Studio and Scratching the Surface, are attempting to not just fill in the gaps left by traditional media’s decline, but to elaborate on the nuances of design and practice. It’s a revival of sorts, bringing back the depth of coverage and authorial voice that have been diminishing, a way to tease out and make transparent the lived realities and conceptual complexities of the designed environment.
Architects David Bruce Lee and Marina Bourderonnet started their podcast The Second Studio (secondstudiopod.com) almost seven years ago. Lee and Bourderonnet were both working in New York at the time; Lee was in graduate school under the tutelage of the late great Michael Sorkin, while Bourderonnet was working at an architecture firm. The couple would come home after a long day and debrief on what took place—the conversations, difficulties, and culture embodied in practice. Lee believed there was something in their conversations that was relatable to both anyone working at a firm and to those who’d grown weary of the tired media landscape.
“A lot of the content was being produced by people who once had a background in architecture, but ages ago. They didn’t quite understand what it meant to be practicing cur-rently because their time was spent teaching architecture or whatever else. There was what I perceived to be a gap,” he says. “And, at that time, similar conversations were happening among our peers, and I felt we could put this in a bottle, so to speak, and launch it out there.”
Bourderonnet hadn’t had much experience listening to pod-casts, but Lee was an avid listener of conversational podcasts, like comedian Ricky Gervais’s self-titled show. “It’s basically three English guys just shooting the breeze for a couple of hours. I thought it was so interesting to have very loosely formatted content that is humorous and sometimes very insightful because three people are talking as if no one’s around,” Lee explains. The two saw parallels in their after-hours chats, which were sometimes light and other times critical. “All our friends are architects, so we had a lot of things to share,” adds Bourderonnet. “We figured, maybe we could record our conversations, put it out there, and see if it resonates with anyone, which eventually it did.” They started anonymously under the name The Midnight Charrette, recording their first episodes at midnight. They had to learn how to use audio equipment and editing software to produce each episode but, most importantly, they had to learn how to speak.
“Listening to myself in the early days, I realized that my architectural education did me a disservice because I was speaking in such a pseudo-academic manner,” says Lee. “I’d listen back and realize it’s very convoluted, so the podcast has been a great tool to learn more about how I speak.” As the podcast evolved (the team changed the name to The Second Studio in 2020), they created different types of episodes: They maintain their late-night chats, called After Hours; invite others for Guest Interviews; provide guidance for clients via Project Companion; and more. After Hours is more explicit—with lots of late-night, post-studio swearing—in comparison to their Fellow Designer episodes, which provide tips for younger practitioners.
The Second Studio has framed itself as an all-in-one podcast, where everyone from students to long-standing practitioners (and design-curious members of the public) can tune in. One of their recent After Hours episodes, “Apples, Bananas, Design Reviews, and the Broken Education System,” candidly addressed the awful nature of architecture school’s end-of-semester critiques. The episode is darkly funny, and also unexpectedly helpful to any student or juror. The hosts’ friendly, informal approach, including interviews and advice, has helped build their reputation, but the conversations draw much-needed connections between practice culture, client relationships, and more, making transparent the closed-door environs of traditional architecture practice.
Jarrett Fuller, a graphic designer and podcaster, produces audio that similarly appeals to many audiences, but focuses solely on one specific storytelling typology: the interview. The podcast and its format came to him while develop-ing his grad school thesis in 2016. Fuller explains, “I was interested in the overlaps in the process of designing and writing, and also in the positionality of the designer and the writer: What does it mean to be a designer who is also writ-ing about the discipline?” He started interviewing designers who are also writers and quickly realized those interviews “were actually really interesting on their own.” Rather than producing a conventional thesis, he turned those interviews into a 20-episode podcast, Scratching the Surface (scratchingthesurface.fm). It continues to this day.
- From The Second Studio Episode #397: “After Hours: Apples, Bananas, Design Reviews, and the Broken Education System”
His podcast resembles NPR’s Fresh Air show in style, but it is for designers and adjacent disciplines. In more than 260 episodes, he’s brought on established names in architecture, like Robert AM Stern, Jeanne Gang, and Reinier de Graaf, and has interviewed critics like Edwin Heathcoate, Kyle Chayka, and Michael Kimmelman. But his curiosity extends past capital-A architecture. “In a weird way, the podcast feels like a completely selfish endeavor. It is a way for me to ask people smarter than me about all the things I’m thinking about,” he says. In September 2019, he interviewed author and artist Jenny Odell; while she has a background in graphic design, the interview connects seemingly disparate topics related to literature, design, and the attention economy. While it’s not a straightforward “story about architecture,” it exemplifies Fuller’s real motivations.
“What animates me are the ideas behind the work,” says Fuller. “It’s about the concepts and stories around the work, sometimes more so than the actual object itself—the narrative around it, how you talk about it, where it comes from, what lineage it fits in. All that stuff is very interesting to me.” To make this podcast successful, he’s had to learn how to conduct interviews to draw these ideas out. “It’s not a puff piece,” he says. “It is meant to be challenging and intellectually stimulating for the guest.”
While The Second Studio is filling a gap in media, Scratching the Surface is attempting to meet a need in design discourse. Fuller is critical not of the media but of designers themselves. “I think the design fields don’t often do a good job of talking about their work, why things look the way they do, how they move through a set of problems or a design brief, or the ideas and inspirations that animate their work. There are better ways to talk about what we do—to talk about design, architecture, and how this stuff fits into the larger world,” he says.
JARRETT FULLER: “I interviewed the designer Michael Rock, who is a principal at the studio 2x4. He had a great quote that he sees graphic design as an ‘elaborate form of writing,’ in that it’s taking pre-existing things and collaging them together in new ways.”
- From Scratching the Surface Episode #132, “Jenny Odell”
“I think the design fields don’t often do a good job of talking about their work, why things look the way they do, how they move through a set of problems or a design brief, or the ideas and inspirations that animate their work. There are better ways to talk about what we do—to talk about design, architecture, and how this stuff fits into the larger world,” he says.
While podcasts aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, both The Second Studio and Scratching the Surface have built solid audiences of people searching for new voices, and for what has disappeared from traditional design media. While they can accomplish many tasks—like adding transparency to architecture firm employment, or enriching a project that has been PR-ified by sanitized sound bites—podcasts are able to draw out deeper meanings, motivations, and processes. It’s not a podcast-as-media solution—rather, it’s a podcast as an enduring provocation
ANJULIE RAO (“Architecture on the Air”) is a Chicago-based journalist and critic covering the built environment. Much of her work addresses the intersections between architecture, landscapes, and cultural change. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
