Kyle Bergman is the founder and director of ADFF, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, which is the world’s largest film festival devoted to the creative spirit of architecture and design.  With a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington DC, Vancouver and on-line, ADFF creates an opportunity to entertain, engage and educate everyone who are excited about architecture and design In this interview Kyle talks about architecture as storytelling, the striking resemblance between the art of making film and the art of making architecture. We talk about how important it is to use the film medium to expand the conversation about the role of architecture and design today. We discuss “knowledge of design”, a separated kind of knowledge, that tells us when something is well designed or not, and this fall’s major event when ADFF and MoMA will showcase the documentary about the genius of Bruce Mau.  Kyle also gives us some great recommendations of films we must watch and reflects on the fact that the films, that make it to the festival, often have an emotional and engaging human dimension in them    

Art Insiders New York Podcast hosted by Anders Holst

ADFF, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FILM FESTIVAL - Interview with Kyle Bergman

Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at New York University. He is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic.  He is best known for the concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration  expressed in his best-selling book “The Rise of the Creative Class”. In this very entertaining interview Richard speaks candidly about his personal background, “a kid from Newark”, and how his childhood experiences and passion for rock’n’roll music have influenced his professional career. We talk about the pandemic and its effects on the future of urban working life, the genius of Jane Jacobs, the Bilboa effect and the importance of intuition in his academic work. We also talk about how the Creative Class’ back to the city movement, finds a home for itself amidst a hotbed of controversial sociocultural topics: gentrification, displacement and inequity, and Richard’s vision for how to choreograph a more powerful dialogue to solve these issues. Photo by Roshan Nebhrajani     

RICHARD FLORIDA - Interview with Richard Florida

Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal at the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging, and publications for a wide range of clients. Today, we find Paula in her studio among her paintings and a collector’s item Porsche that she has hand-painted with an artistic rendering of a map of the Unites States for a special exhibition. In this interview, Paula explains her metaphor for coming up with new ideas as a “slot machine”, talks about typography as it relates to spirit and meaning, and tells inspiring stories from her design collaborations with the Public Theater, Shake Shack, MoMA, Citibank, The High Line, and Rockaway Beach.    Paula has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors including the National Design Award and the AIGA medal. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. A documentary on Paula and her work can be seen in the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.”   

PAULA SCHER - Interview with Paula Scher

Emma Enderby is the Chief Curator at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a unique art institution with a bold vision of and for the century we are in. In this fascinating interview, Emma talks passionately about the guiding principles that helped building the program and how “artists can tell us realities of our time; stories of the past can predict the future, so important in helping us understand the moment that we are in.” We discuss what makes good art; her personal taste in art as well as books and artists that inspire her, among them Agnes Denes and Hilma af Klint. Commissions are at the heart of The Shed’s mission -- one prime example being their annual “Open Call,” which opens on June 3 this year. “Open Call” is a series of exhibitions and events aimed at providing invaluable support, visibility, and recognition to New York's early-career artists, working across all forms and media. This year “Open Call” received 1,500 proposals and features 27 artists.  The Shed's remarkably innovative design is at the core of its support of artists’ visions and the work they create – from hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theatre or dance, and beyond, all under one roof. Or in this case, no roof is an option!   Photo: Scott Rudd Events © 2018   

THE SHED - Interview with Emma Enderby

George Smart is the founder and executive director of USModernist, which is an award-winning nonprofit educational archive for the documentation, preservation, and promotion of residential Modernist architecture. In this free floating, fun, and inspiring conversation, we cover the philosophy and art form of Modernism, how a house “can live back at you”, the geniuses of Bjarke Ingels and Santiago Calatrava, the history of the butterfly chair and the intricate relationship between Modernism and jazz. With 8,000 houses and nearly 3.1 million pages of 20th-century architecture magazines, USModernist is America's largest open digital archive of Modernist houses and their architects. The organization has won 16 local, state, and national awards, including the 2016 AIA Institute Honors for Collaborative and Professional Achievement, the AIA's highest award for non-architects.  Photo by Elizabeth Galecke      

MODERNISM - Interview with George Smart

Craig Dykers is one of the founding partners of the internationally renowned architectural firm Snøhetta. In this fascinating interview he tells the emotional and inspiring story of the creation of the National September 11 Museum Pavilion in New York. He also tells the story of Snøhetta’s collaborative and creative philosophy, describing the architectural firm as “a place that nobody is from, but anyone can go to."  This, along with Craig Dyker’s renaissance personality -- architect, business leader, artist, poet, nature lover and linguist -- gives a unique and rare insight into Snøhetta’s international success. In 2020, Snøhetta was recognized as #2 on Fast Company’s prestigious annual list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the architecture category “for pioneering carbon-negative buildings that generate more energy than they consume.” 

SNØHETTA - Interview with Craig Dykers

Philip Williams is the prolific collector and director of Philip Williams Posters, founded in 1973. His Tribeca gallery, located on Chambers Street, is the largest vintage poster gallery in the world with over 100,000 unique posters dating from 1870 to the present. The Tribeca brick-and-mortar storefront is supplemented with an online platform, PosterMuseum.com, which contains some 26,000 posters. In this episode, Philip Williams tells fascinating stories cultivated from over 40 years of collecting vintage posters and details how it all started, after finding letters from aviation pioneer Orville Wright in an abandoned suitcase.  We also learn about the poster as cultural artifact: From the first golden age of the vintage poster in the late 19th century driven by innovative printing techniques and emerging mass markets; to the second golden age in the mid 1960s, where posters were repurposed as countercultural protest; to its use today, as a staple in contemporary interior design   

THE VINTAGE POSTER - Interview with Philip Williams

Justin Rivers, the multi-talented Chief Experience Officer at Untapped New York, takes us on a fascinating tour of the city, unearthing the history of the old Penn Station and the new Daniel Moynihan Train Hall, considered to be one of the city’s most ambitious modern civic projects. We will also visit the little-known underground subway landmark, the City Hall Loop, as well as the Chamber Street Station inside the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building. Justin Rivers is a writer, playwright, educator and a tour guide of Untapped NYC, whose most popular tours include “The Underground Tour of the NYC Subway,” the “Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam” and the “Remnants of Penn Station.”  Untapped New York, founded by Michelle Young in 2009, is dedicated to help New Yorkers rediscovering their city, and its website is visited by over 4 million people a year. Untapped New York has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, on Netflix and more.   

HIDDEN SECRETS AT PENN STATION, THE NEW MOYNIHAN TRAIN HALL, THE CITY HALL LOOP AND THE CHAMBER STREET STATION - Interview with Justin Rivers

Roselee Goldberg is a renowned art historian, critic and Founding Director and Chief Curator of Performa, a “museum without walls”, a non–profit arts organization which - since its inception in 2005 – has quickly become one of the most anticipated bi-annual contemporary art events in the country and abroad. Performa has reached an international audience of over 250,000 people and features more than 700 artists at 216 venues throughout New York City.   Roselee Goldberg pioneered the study of performance art with her seminal book, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, first published in 1979, now in its third edition and translated to thirteen languages. It serves as a key text for teaching performance in universities throughout the world.   

DEFINING PERFORMANCE ART - Interview with Roselee Goldberg

James and Karla Murray are not only husband-and-wife but also prolific architectural and interior design photographers whose critically acclaimed books include Store Front: The Disappearing Face New York, New York Nights, Store Front II- A History Preserved and Broken Windows-Graffiti NYC. Their important mission is to document the disappearance of the Mom and Pop economy, often the backbone of the New York's cityscape standing in sharp contrast to the city's rapidly evolving corporate facade. Their photographs have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, London Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York Magazine and The New YorkerYou can follow them on YouTube where they have published some 90 episodes of verité-style neighborhood exploration around New York City from their unique perspective. 

THE DISAPPEARING FACE OF NEW YORK - Interview with James and Karla Murray

 Susan Lacy is a master of the biographical documentary genre. She has created, directed and served as executive producer of the Emmy-award winning PBS series AMERICAN MASTERS -- by many considered to be the gold standard of documentary filmmaking. In this fascinating interview Susan talks about the origins of American Masters, she also shares stories and reflects on the essence of documentaries she produced at HBO about Jane Fonda and Steven Spielberg and her latest documentary called “Very Ralph”, about the iconic American fashion designer Ralph Lauren. Photography by Lorella Zanetti   

RALPH LAUREN, JANE FONDA, STEVEN SPIELBERG & AMERICAN MASTERS - Interview with Susan Lacy

Richard Southwick, Partner at the international architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle, tells the fascinating story behind the preservation, restoration and reinvention of Eero Saarinen’s architectural masterpiece, the TWA Flight Center at J F Kennedy International Airport, now called the TWA Hotel. Saarinen described the head house form as being like the “Leonardo da Vinci flying machine", according to his associate Kevin Roche.  Hailed as the “Grand Central of the Jet Age,” the TWA Flight Center welcomed hundreds of thousands of travelers to JFK Airport from 1962 through 2001. Since then tens of thousands of people have been touring the building. We talk about the beautiful design of the building, the genius of Eero Saarinen and Richard’s favorite role models as well as his top three projects over his successful career. 

TWA FLIGHT CENTER/HOTEL - Interview with Richard Southwick

Clodagh is an Irish-born New York-based designer who are among Architectural Digest’s Top 100 Interior Designers and a member of the Interior Design Hall of Fame. Clodagh just release her most recent book Clodagh: Life-Enhancing Design published by GArts. In this fascinating conversation, sprinkled with good humor and smart tips for re-inventing your space, Clodagh reflects on a deeper level about great design coming from within and the role of design as a healing art. Clodagh talks about the spiritual side of her work influenced by her childhood’s healers and mystics in Ireland and her early adoption of Feng Shui and her innovative approach by integrating concepts like Chromotheraphy and Biophilia and sustainable material. This contributes to her unique look, structure and flow that appeal to all human senses, that go beyond the physical to things you can feel but not see. Clodagh received the Platinum Circle Humanitarian Award from Hospitality Design Magazine in 2016 and won the 2018 Global Wellness Awards for spearheading wellness design at the Global Wellness Summit. She has an honorary doctorate from the New York School of Interior Design and the San Francisco Academy of Art. Photo by Jonathan Beckerman.    

CLODAGH DESIGN - Interview with Clodagh

Maxi Cohen is an award-winning multimedia artist and independent filmmaker based in New York, who co-founded Art 2 Heart SoHo - an ongoing call for over 100 artists to bring optimism, healing and love by painting messages on boarded up buildings in the neighborhood that birthed contemporary art and that was heavily looted in a riot on May 31. Art2Heart is collaborating with James Cavello of Westwood Gallery to curate future exhibitions of these pieces to benefit the participating artists and Black Lives Matter causes. Maxi Cohen also discusses her groundbreaking and inspiring documentaries: Joe and Maxi, a feature-length documentary about her relationship with her father, Anger, part of the Seven Sins, Seven Women film, South Central Los Angeles,: Inside Voices, in response to the Los Angeles riots of 1992, From Shock to Awe, the story of suicidal veterans, Ladies Rooms All Over the World and Movement of Water.   

AFTER THE RIOT - ART2HEART RECLAIMS SOHO - Interview with Maxi Cohen

David Montgomery, a Brooklyn-born photographer living in London since many years, is one of the most legendary photographers of all time, capable to mix art, fashion, music, cinema and pop culture, a regular contributor to Vogue, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and many more. In this interview David shares extraordinary stories from his long career, meetings with people and memorable moments, we talk about talent and creativity, the influence of jazz and divine inspiration and the role of spirituality in his work.   

DAVID MONTGOMERY - Interview with David Montgomery

Art Insiders New York podcast offers behind-the-scenes conversations with fascinating people who are making an impact in the world of art, design and architecture in New York. The podcast is hosted by Anders Holst.

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Art Insiders New York Podcast hosted by Anders Holst

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