Dan and Greg interview Matt Nardella, founder of Moss Design, a Chicago design-build firm with an array of residential and commercial projects, and a bent for nudging clients and neighbors toward sustainability in small, but meaningful increments.


Interviewee: Matt Nardella


Intro / Outro: “Highway Chile”, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience


Discussed:


- NewSchool of Architecture San Diego


- Architects as developers, contractors and multi-disciplinary designers


- In praise of not designing projects on a spreadsheet (and finding the gray zones of zoning)


- Credit due to:


o Ted Smith > The Red Office


o Jonathan Segal


- Architect, Know (and Sell) Thyself!


- The SCI-ARC Blowout


- Ending brute-force office culture > how to not “punch down”


- “We (architects) should be interviewing them (developers)”


- Monocultures of design making people sick and unhappy?


- Nightingale Housing, Melbourne - Jeremy McLeod and Maria Yanez


- You don’t need to spend more money to achieve sustainability – you just need to seriously undertake site analysis and translate that into a building, while thinking like a builder and the client – or being both, potentially.


- Want to build? Blog first!


- “Granny flats” are back in Chicago and the city is building 9,000 new units in the West Looop – will that help the housing crisis?


- On being a “bike warrior


- Are people in happy countries just driving less?


- Vision Zero


- The best way to make an argument for bike commuting is to just do it


- Park(ing) Day