Hi Friends—
Today I bring you a new conversation with Frank Harmon, an old friend who taught me architectural design at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, back in 2012, and inspired me to look at the world differently.
Frank is a renowned award-winning architect, professor, writer, and an avid sketcher who always has a sketchbook with him.
He writes to find out what he’s thinking and draws to understand what he’s looking at to ensure he doesn’t forget it.
In this episode, we talk about writing, drawing, design, life, and how digital technologies make the world completely placeless. "It’s too late to stop [the internet], but what we can do as architects and artists and writers is give people a sense of place where they are."
Frank believes we can make places that have something physical and concrete grounding us in an otherwise unlimited digital world.
Listen to "Frank Harmon — Writing, Drawing, and Sense of Place"
Chapters
00:00 · Introduction
01:14 · Writing
05:00 · Becoming an architect
06:21 · Frank's book
07:19 · Living in London
09:03 · Studying abroad in the US
13:37 · Childhood place
20:38 · Born with screens
23:39 · Design
27:42 · Place
33:41 · Good architecture
37:10 · Bad architecture
38:48 · Frank Gehry's middle finger
39:31 · Native Places: Drawing as a Way to See
43:47 · The best way to write
44:23 · The purpose of sketching
45:45 · Thanks
46:09 · Outro