I've never been to Nashville, but I hear it's a pretty good city for music. According to this new report from PennPraxis, titled the Nashville Independent Venues Study, the city has 252 venues that showcase live music. And more than 100 of them are solely dedicated to music.

This gives Nashville one of the densest clusters of live music venues per capita, anywhere in the world. I also remember reading somewhere that the majority of venture funded startups in the city are in the music industry. So Nashville has a real music ecosystem going.

Of course, when you're really good at something it can create a dual-edged sword. In the case of Nashville, this success has led to growth, more bachelor/bachelorette parties being hosted in the city and, ultimately, developers wanting to build lots of new things.

Right now, the city seems to be grappling with how best to balance this growth against the preservation of its live music scene. And that's what this new report is focused on.

The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design -- my alma mater -- has just launched a new initiative with Surface Magazine called the Surface Summer School at Penn. A fairly unique partnership between a media company and an accredited university, the goal of the "summer school" is twofold.

One, it gives Penn students, who might otherwise struggle to find an internship in this climate, something productive and positive to do over the summer. And two, it applies design thinking to the problems of this pandemic.

Penn students will have the month of June to design a prefabricated COVID-19 testing structure -- one that could be rolled out in dense and compact urban centers around the world. A jury will then review the submissions and a winner will be announced by mid-July.

The jury includes a host of noteworthy architects and designers: Winka Dubbeldam, Dror Benshetrit, Thom Mayne, Yves Béhar, Susan Sellers, Marion Weiss, Ferda Kolatan, Joe Doucet, and others. Starting on June 3rd at 6:30 PM eastern, members of the jury will also start delivering design lectures on Surface's Instagram.

I am looking forward to seeing the submissions. Hopefully all of them will be made public.

Photo by Dyana Wing So on Unsplash

Yesterday I promised that today’s post would be less sad. I am sticking to that promise, but I am also sticking with a somewhat similar theme: getting older.

Fast Company recently published an interview with New York-based architect Matthias Hollwich. The topic is aging and the kinds of spaces that we have created for people as they age: retirement communities, nursing homes, and so on.

The reason this is getting airtime right now is because Matthias has just published a book on the topic called, New Aging: Live smarter now to live better forever. 

But this isn’t a new focus. Matthias actually taught at the University of Pennsylvania while I was there and I remember his design studio being focused on this topic. (I wasn’t in his studio, unfortunately.)

The sound bite that I really like from the interview is this one:

“I think the biggest flaw is that it’s age segregation. You take all of the people who are above 75, 85, or 95, depending on what type of environment it is, and put them into one place. And then you’re just surrounded by old people, people who have social and physical challenges, and you’re not around the vibrancy of a multi-age environment, which is something that we experience all life long. I think that is something that society really has to rethink.”

Not only do I agree with him, but I think it exemplifies one of the things that I love about architecture. The idea that the way things are done today is usually not some sort of universal truth. Instead, everything can be questioned, rethought, and reinvented for the better. It’s a very entrepreneurial way of operating and I don’t think that parallel, between entrepreneurs and architects, is drawn or leveraged nearly enough.

I also don’t think we’ve given enough design consideration to this topic of aging. I mean, why can’t the spaces that people end their lives in be as (or more) sexy and enjoyable as (or than) the spaces they live the rest of their lives in? That’s what I want when I’m 95.

So kudos to Mattias and the rest of the team at Hollwich Kushner (his firm) for caring about and working on this. 

Book image from Matthias Hollwich’s Facebook.