People You Should Know About in Art & Urbanism

David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison were a band called The Talking Heads. Frantz was Byrne's and Weymouth's Studio TA at RISD. Frantz has an architecture degree from the GSD at Harvard. They quit architecture school after three years and formed the band in New York during the punk era. They were a root band in a very different sort of art focused punk that centered on New York's lower East Side.



In 1983 I was introduced to them by going to a concert in Dallas on The Stop Making Sense tour. The concert, which was very conceptual in nature, was filmed by Jonathan Demme. I think the concert I had seen just before this one was Def Lepperd or Rush. It was the first concert I went to where people in the audience danced. David Byrne interviews himself HERE while talking about Stop Making Sense. It was incredible.

Byrne has always had side careers as an artist, philosphe, and urbanist. He's emerged as the best spoken voice in favor of a sensibility towards biking in the city that I share. Some of his art is bike racks. He rides in NYC a lot.



Here he is on Space Ghost. He edited it.

We recommend you buy the book, Bicycle Diaries in prepapration for your time in Berlin. It has both a section on riding through Sweetwater, TX and Berlin. You can't beat that.

What David Byrne's career really shows us is a care and position about the way we live in cities. As architects it is one of the most basic issues for which we are responsible. We make the fabric of buildings. That aggregate sums into another thing- a neighborhood, a town, or a city. That thing is a very organic thing formed in both time and place. Doctors don't get paid for their attention to Public Health- neither will you, except in how your sense of the city informs and enriches the buildings you make to impact the city. The first and foremost reason for making a building is improving the city. That is what we certainly can effect. There's no way to quantify the economic effect fo a particular building and rarely is it profitable in this way across much length of time. We can, though, measure the way a building formally fits into a city, the way it acts as a civic device in human interaction. As Winston Churchill said, "We shape our cities and then they shape us."

What you should learn this summer is a lot of what we should have been teaching you all along- architecture is ultimately measured through a matrix about the city. We call that study and measurement urbanism. The education I got at UT-Arlington was much more about making things in the city than you are getting now. You can't really understand a Lubbock until you get the sort of foundational education about urbanism that we'll try to give you in Berlin. It will be there for your taking. We'll take time on bike trips to pass right through layers and conditions of the city. None of those trips are required or graded. Like the architect's role in urbanism, it is a part of the professional education that cannot be directly rewarded or assessed. The effect only works if we band together, share our knowledge and visions, and practice building as a profession, not a a component in a different industry (real estate, development, government, investment).

By far, the best way you can learn this stuff is to find questions and make comparisons.

Buy the book (or ask for it as a gift), if you can.


Don't make me tell you that the guys in Pink Floyd were architecture students too.