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- [00:00]
Michael Murphy
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- [00:34]
Bob Garfield
It's Wednesday, July 15, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Bob Garfield, author of the Bully Pulpit blog on Substack and co host with Mike Volo of Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language on the Gist. We bring you a new interview Mike recently did with architect and author Michael Murphy. The book is Our World in 10 How Architecture Defines who We Are and how we live. First, a fun none of those 10 structures, surprisingly, is a Quonset hut from the indigenous Algonquin word meaning small, long place. Other Algonquin words borrowed for the English language are squash, pecan, and please note, Rocky and Bullwinkle fans Muss and Sverl. So boomers take note. Boris and Natasha might not have been Russian spies after all. They may have been deep cover Native Americans. I strongly advise you to switch off the Gist right now and tune into Lexicon Valley, where such mind blowing revelations are our stock in trade. Looks like you've stayed here. Whatever about Murphy's Our World in 10 buildings? Pesca thought it was one of those reductive world in 50 object type books and didn't really want to do the interview. But he did do his due diligence as always, and he read the book, finding it to be a far more personal odyssey than he'd expected. And so up next, Michael and Michael.
- [02:20]
Mike Volo
So I collect, or did collect comic books and I was trying to sell them and it was dispiriting because sometimes I had, in some cases I held onto them for decades or I bought them in the late 90s and so their price go up. But then when I take them to a store, you know, I understand they have rent to pay. I thought they'd pay a quarter of what maybe a comic book of such vintage and good condition was listed. But this is not true. This is why whatnot is really helpful. First of all, they're a community and I have just been looking at some of their videos about caviar, the fish videos. You could buy a whole bunch of fish and crab on whatnot. But forget buying. Just wade in and see what they're selling. Whether businesses are big or small or don't even exist, people selling on whatnot sell 10 times more than other major marketplaces because it doesn't really always feel like a market place. It feels like a show. And the people who are doing the selling, sometimes there's another, there's another version of this where people talk about all the clothes they got in a storage locker and they'll just go through a bag of clothes. Look at these pants, look at these shoes. There's a lot of just really off the wall unexpected joy there across whatnot, the number of sellers making over a million dollars a year has doubled. Search whatnot W h a t N o t in the app store download and you could start selling right away. Did you know that when helping older Navy dolphins, a researcher unlocked a secret to healthy aging for all of us, even the non dolphins among us. And you know, everyone loves dolphins and I hope I can convince you to love yourself just like our flippered friends. You're worth it. I'm excited to share with you guys. C15 from Fatty 15. The first emerging essential fatty acid to be discovered in more than 90 years. It's an incredible scientific breakthrough. It supports long term health and wellness and healthy aging. So the founder of Fatty 15, Dr. Stephanie Ven Watson, discovered the benefits of C15 while working with the US Navy to continually improve the health and welfare of older dolphins. She went to the dolphin retirement home and she noticed some of them were really thriving. What do they have? It's what is now called C15. She did studies on cellular fragility syndrome caused by the lack of C15. As many as one in three people, I can't give you the dolphin percentage worldwide may have C15 levels and fragile cells. We're all aging. Which means that healthy aging starts from birth. Studies have shown that C15 is a foundational nutrient for you. And for flipper. I'm taking fatty 15. They give it to you in a nice glass vial. I pop one every day and I have to say I feel a little bit more energy and I've been very successful at disabling bombs with my nose underwater. No, I joke about that, but I do feel a little Vim. Fatty 15 was developed to support healthy aging for all from kids to parents to grandparents. That's why award winning fatty 15 is now available as pure capsules, Delicious apple mint gummies for teens and adults and yummy berry blast gummies for kids. Fatty 15 is on a mission to support healthy aging for all, including all ages and stages of life. You can get an additional 15% off their 90 day subscription starter kit by going to fatty15.com gist and using code GIST at checkout. The 2026 primaries are all around us and you could trade the biggest political races on Cowsheet. On Cow she, you could trade major primaries, election outcomes and the biggest political storylines as they happen. Like you could pick who will win the Senate, the Democrats or the Republicans. Or let's take California. Will Karen Bass or Naima Raymond win the California mayor race right now? Bass is currently trading at 63%, meaning $100 trade would pay out. That's $155 if she wins the mayor's race. You could bet on when Jay Clayton will be confirmed or when will traffic at the Strait of Hormuz return to normal? It's pretty close. 64%. 65% as I speak ticked up 1% before September 1, 2026. So bet 100. What's that? 65%? You win about a little less than 150. 147. 148 on Kalshi, you're trading against peers in a live market, meaning there's no house. As the probability changes, you can buy in and out of your position for a limited time. Download the Cowshi app and use code gist to get $10 when you trade 10k a l shi kalshi trade on anything 18 plus. Only restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Event contract trading involves risk may not be suitable for all investors. Prices, values and available markets may differ from those mentioned. For more information, see kalshee.com regulatory I've been working on creating a more peaceful nighttime routine for deeper sleep. That is until my two puppies come and they live in my room anyway. The biggest upgrade or the Puppy Defense Fund wasn't aroma therapy. It wasn't meditation, wasn't listening and setting my intention or playing some sort of backing track. That was the whales. It was my King mattress from Lisa. Turns out the best hack to improve your sleep is to address what you've been sleeping on. And since making the switch, I unwind easier, sleep deeper and and wake up feeling energized. My bed is my happy place. Soon the dogs will be on it. I'll have only my Lisa to protect me. This is a thing of beauty that lets me get my beauty sleep. Lisa mattresses are meticulously designed and assembled in the USA for exceptional quality and they have free shipping and easy returns and 120 night sleep trial. They won the awards. They won all the mattresses. Best hybrid and best memory foam mattress was named by the New York Times wirecutter. They're featured by West Elm as their go to mattress partner. Lisa is committed to eco friendly materials and sustainable practices. And I should say that they also have this really cool sleep quiz where you'll find your perfect match in less than two minutes. Go to quiz.Lisa L E E S A.com in fact, go to Lisa.com for 30% off on their July 4th sale. In fact, they're extending their July 4th sale even beyond July 4th. They're taking it all the way to the 13th. So that's 30% off plus an extra $50 off with promo code the Gist exclusive for my listeners. That's L E S A.com promo code the Gist for the July 4th sale, which goes way beyond July 4th. It's 30% off. And then we'll also give you an extra $50 off. Support our show and let them know we sent you a checkout. Lisa.com promo code the Gist. I live with an architect and I live in a house. And I live in a house with an architect. So if you had asked me what's that going to be like, I would say, well, it probably means that all my thoughts about where the vase goes are wrong. But no, there is a genius to architecture, which I think I took for granted before I lived with this genius architect who would say things like, actually you want the plant to take about a third out outside the vase and then you want the second two thirds to be the vase. It's sort of a constant in human esthetics. And damn it, she's right. Well, a new book by an experienced architect has opened my eyes to these insights and more. It is called Our World in 10 Buildings. How architecture Defines who we are and how we live. Michael P. Murphy, welcome to the gist.
- [10:52]
Michael Murphy
So happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Mike.
- [10:54]
Mike Volo
And that's true, isn't it? There are commonalities, human commonalities, that not just the ancients thought about, but recent research has pointed us to know. This almost always works for all humans and this almost always doesn't.
- [11:09]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, I think there's both the kind of basic sense of balance and organization and kind of visual perspective of how spaces can be inhabited and look better. But there are increasingly a number of new scientific evidence proof points which show that the spaces around us are shaping us and changing us and we need to take them More for. Not for granted, but more seriously and understanding how our lives are influenced by the buildings in which we live in, you know, 90% of our lives.
- [11:43]
Mike Volo
Yeah. Before I get to the 10 buildings, are there aspects to architecture that have changed? And maybe we could talk about the for the better or for the worse, but there are always trends. Did some of the trends that existed, maybe when you were a kid or when you were first starting architecture school, were some of those trends actually in violation of what we've been finding out scientifically about the what. What pleases us as a built world or just aesthetically?
- [12:11]
Michael Murphy
That's a good question. I mean, I think there's always architects who are pushing the edge. Great architectural buildings are always trying to challenge what our assumptions are of what the spaces around us should be, and always testing, testing at the cutting edge of what spaces could look like, what they could be experienced as. I think architects are particularly talented in trying to think of this sensory world. And then there's sort of everyday, ordinary buildings which may be learning some of those lessons, but don't take all of them into account and are more, let's say, designed by, let's say, their economic condition or the proforma, and may not be thinking about designing the environment for people's experience, full stop. I think your question about when I was studying and how things have changed, when I started architecture school in this was 2006. It was right before the financial collapse of 2008, which was famously when all architects sort of lost their jobs.
- [13:15]
Mike Volo
Right, the shantytown period. Yes. Corrugated boxes took hold.
- [13:20]
Michael Murphy
That's right. And so at that period of time, was this sort of ascendant, was this starchitect period where the kind of great famous architects were lauded and. And the kind of theory of these great formal interventions changing cities, like the Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, that was sort of the era we were in where formalism, a new formalism, was really kind of taking over. And I think got challenged with the financial collapse and subsequent rethinking of the spaces around us and how we should be thinking about their impact on community.
- [13:56]
Mike Volo
Did Gary. We can't say Gary got it wrong. Total genius. But was there excess and we just didn't have the money to fuel that vision, or was there some sort of reconsideration that came when the tide came in and we saw who was swimming without shorts?
- [14:15]
Michael Murphy
I mean, I try to address the question. The Gary question or the Bilbao effect in my book?
- [14:21]
Mike Volo
Actually, yes.
- [14:23]
Michael Murphy
And say it's both. Right. And incomplete the story that there is an impact that the architecture certainly had, because the sort of reimagination of Bilbao, in particular with that museum, was profound, international. It was quite striking. And everyone was talking about it for years, both within the discipline and in the public. It had a real, I think, translation to a public understanding of, oh, wow, this is new, this is unique, this is exciting, and I want to go check it out. So there's a sort of spectacularness to it. Now, I think the story that's not told often is how much work the city of Bilbao legislation, taxes that were levied to build the foundation of this new arts district, the kind of planning that went in for decades before, allowed for this new showpiece museum to be.
- [15:18]
Mike Volo
Right. Right. So the starchitect draws attention as, ooh, this is the singular genius. The building itself. Maybe the story can be told, oh, Bilbao gets revitalized because of this one building. And, no, it's the centerpiece. And maybe people internationally know about it, but it's everything around the building that created the opportunity and context for what we think of Bilbao and the rejuvenation thereof.
- [15:47]
Michael Murphy
And I think that's a good articulation of architecture's role in place. I think of it like a rhizomatic structure, like a mushroom. You kind of see the mushroom, but underneath the ground is this vast system that's working to allow the structures above it to function and to succeed. And that system is what we actually need to make more visible in our buildings and in the spaces around us. To show how the world around us is shaping us is to make visible that invisible substrate of the systems around us.
- [16:20]
Mike Volo
Yeah. So Vitruvius says that the ideal building has three elements. Firmitas, utilitaries, and venustas. And, of course, for my listeners, I don't need to translate the ancient room in the ancient Latin, but I will. Sturdy, useful, and beautiful. And I loved that we have some Vitruvius. Vitruvius in the house. I want to jump ahead, and we'll then come back to some of your earlier projects, but one of the 10 buildings, which isn't really a building that you talk about, is the work you did in Hudson, New York, and a mall, a walkable mall. And this reminds me a little bit of what we were talking about with Bilbao, because it was a revitalization that was taking advantage of what we understood really works for cities. How did you get that project? What were you tasked with?
- [17:08]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, so this is actually one clarification is Poughkeepsie New York, Poughkeepsie, in the Hudson Valley. In the Hudson Valley of New York, but 90 miles north of New York City. It's actually the town I grew up in and went to high school in. And I was told when I was growing up there that it was architects and planners that had killed the city. And that there are these big moves that happened in the post war, the urban renewal period, where big plans were developed to address at that time, people leaving the city, the city emptying, kind of poverty. And those plans were significant. They demolished huge swaths of old buildings, housing commercial properties. They built big parking lots. They had a main street in the center of the city that they bricked in and made pedestrian for walkability, so made it a kind of mall. And then they built a few kind of civic buildings in this kind of brutalist, 19, late 60s, 70s style. And they hoped that revitalization would happen. And that kind of imagined dream never really occurred. And I wanted to understand why that was in a deeper way, now that I had graduated from architecture school, now that I had kind of been a little bit more versed in sort of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I tried to understand that downtown district and what could happen if we thought about it more holistically, with lessons like we learned from Bill Bowen elsewhere. Because there's cities all over the country, especially small second tier cities, that are suffering, that are struggling and that can't get the kind of economic revitalization or can't get their population to stay or need a influx of capital to take on a new vision of its future and are struggling to do so. And my hometown is certainly one of those. And I wanted to understand that.
- [19:10]
Mike Volo
Yeah. And so what did you do? What did you build to solve these problems?
- [19:15]
Michael Murphy
Well, there was no project per se, because there's no one who's going to finance reimagining the downtown mall. But there was an opportunity to kind of make our own project. So the organization that I founded, Mass Design Group, was a nonprofit organization. I founded it with some colleagues of mine from school. And because we were a nonprofit, I was able to raise third party grant funding and deploy projects that we felt were worth doing research on or initiating ourselves. It turns out a lot of nonprofits and community groups and entities have building projects in their plans, but have no capital to do that kind of work to make them happen. So I put a team in the downtown of Poughkeepsie. We worked on setting up a small community design center. We invited conversation and tried to Initiate and incubate projects that had been kind of sitting on the shelves for a long time and see if they could jumpstart some new, like, reimagination efforts within the. Within the downtown.
- [20:25]
Mike Volo
How'd it go?
- [20:26]
Michael Murphy
Well, there's a, you know, a number of things. We built some affordable housing. We've designed and worked on a art center downtown called the Trolley Barn. Art center was an old garage that held trolleys. I never knew it existed. It was sort of behind an old car garage business when I was growing up there. And then recently, a new factory that had been emptied and kind of abandoned for many years. We helped install the great nonprofit Scenic Hudson in there as its new headquarters and revitalize that. And some new imagination and interest in the city has happened. I wouldn't say it's complete. I think there's still work to be done. But cities all over the Hudson Valley, which looked like Poughkeepsie, have started to change. We see Kingston, New York, and Beacon, New York, and Hudson, New York. All these places all kind of looked and were suffering a similar economic challenge as my hometown was when I grew up there in the 90s, but now have seen huge resurgence of people moving up from New York City and elsewhere, making the Hudson Valley their home. And so I'm optimistic that there's sort of new futures in a city like Poughkeepsie.
- [21:43]
Mike Volo
Yeah, I was there last week in Kingston and Beacon recently, and I got married right near Hudson. So I'm really familiar with that. And there's a lot of energy and there's a lot of intention, but, you know, without, I think, a really sizable tax base, I think there's only so much that the architects can do. So to some extent, really grand visions of architecture can only go so far if there is not a lot of money to fund the mission. And that's. I don't know if that's sad or reality or maybe it's a creative opportunity.
- [22:18]
Michael Murphy
I think that's true. I mean, one of the conclusions I had from the work in that small city is that it's actually. It's a slightly bigger city than these other smaller towns that has more population and it has a bigger land area. And so, one, you need to develop more for that kind of revitalization energy to really take hold. Whereas in a place like Hudson or Beacon, which have actually a small land area, you can see the change more rapidly. And two, you need that tax base, and you need to kind of encourage development to happen, actually. There needs to be new investment and That I found to be challenging in, in this climate where it's hard to develop anything, let alone in a city which would be pretty risky to develop under its current conditions.
- [23:08]
Mike Volo
Now is this is the challenge because of regulations?
- [23:12]
Michael Murphy
There's regulation, there's legislation, but I think there's also just financing it period is difficult. And so trying to think about new models of financing development is what I got excited about after working in my hometown and seeing the challenges that even optimistic folks are, even those who are optimistic have challenged getting development to happen within the city itself.
- [23:37]
Mike Volo
So in the book you write about, another book which is a classic of the genre, the Power Broker by Robert Caro about Robert Moses. And for a time, for a long time, the intelligentsia interpreted great book, unbelievably researched. And I think the Robert Moses idea of urban vitalization, especially because there was some explicitly racist elements to it, was degraded as the way forward. And more of the Jane Jacobs walkable city model was embraced. I don't know how many cities could be walkable. You know, Jane Jacobs ideal was the village. But in your understanding of what Moses was doing, what Kara was writing about and just the reality of how the urban built environment works, what do we maybe or the intelligentsia that rejected Moses, what did we get wrong, do you think?
- [24:36]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, you get right, right into the, into the power broker. I love that. Yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's actually, it's an incredible book. It was my father's favorite book who was sort of in local politics and I read his old dog eared copy early in my days and I found that tension fascinating, that debate between Jacobs and Moses. Fascinating. Here you had someone who, and Caro describes this, was able to transform not just New York City, but the state of New York. Build more parks, more housing than anyone else and build highways.
- [25:14]
Mike Volo
The Roman Empire.
- [25:16]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, I mean just unbelievable amount of construction, a lot of it for the public, public good. And built highways that destroyed neighborhoods, was indifferent to public transportation, made huge mistakes and huge blind spots in some of his massive planning initiatives and building projects. And so what you have is the kind of sheer will of completion of big visionary projects. Unwilling to get bogged down in the morass of all the complexities of getting these big projects done. Someone who is able to push it forward. So that is something to think about as critical. And then also you have a lack of consideration and design for the context and place and people, which actually has caused generational problems into some of the neighborhoods in which Ramos's work transformed and Changed, I mean, most notably the Cross Bronx Expressway. And you know, I think when we think about what should happen in the future, there's increasing return now to the idea that actually we are stuck. We can't build subways, we can't build housing, we can't get things finished. There's so many projects that are just stalled and so expensive that we need to return in a way to understanding like what it means to make something happen and push it forward with a great vision and be cognizant now of the kind of externality costs that we might have like ignored 60 years ago. But, but pay attention to them without having them ruin and disrupt and bog down the project altogether.
- [26:58]
Bob Garfield
Right?
- [26:59]
Mike Volo
So let's do the ambition without the racism, the ambition without the hatred of the poor. It doesn't to execute that seems hard, but to conceptualize it doesn't that hard. Most of the architects I talk to, no matter where they are on the political spectrum and by the way, they're always to the left. The ones I talk to, they all agree with that.
- [27:21]
Michael Murphy
You know, one of the things I found in my research, which I've, I've tried to elevate in some of the writing, is to remind, remind the architecture community and the public. You know that story I was told growing up in Poughkeepsie, that it was architects that ruined our city and they were all racist and they were all against the poor. Well, I think some of that is certainly true, that there is a characterization that they were indifferent to people's lived condition. And a lot of the money that was used through Johnson's Great Society programs were anti poverty program money. It was delivered through very left leaning aligned Democratic politicians who were affiliated with the Johnson administration. One of the reasons Poughkeepsie got so much money and was so effective in its demolition is because it was so progressively had such progressive elected representatives and they were getting more funding for these anti poverty programs to address the crisis of economic decline in the city. And so you have again, the kind of. The left was pushing a lot of those agendas in the 60s, had blind spots, some had true biases, but certainly some thought they were doing the right thing. And in the literature and in the reading of these big design programs, you see a lot of the same language that we see today, except. And then you have created these kind of urban renewal nightmares that have never recovered. And so I was sort of really struck with the kind of mirroring that was happening actually, that like if we are to progress with federal investments in infrastructure we not only can be signal that we are aware of the kind of mistakes of the past, but we also have to be self critical about the language we're using in not implementing the same strategies of, let's say, virtue while creating great challenges and problems for the future.
- [29:17]
Mike Volo
Virtue? Is that what you mean by the language? I'm sure some of the phrases have changed, right? Like you won't see a reference to marginalized communities in 1968. But what else do you mean by the language?
- [29:30]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, I think largely poverty alleviation, economic decline. You don't see blight anymore, for example,
- [29:38]
Mike Volo
although slum clearance is not something that
- [29:41]
Michael Murphy
anyone hearing that some people in leadership today are using blight, again, using that same language. But I think largely that's out of the documentation. However, poverty alleviation, economic improvement, those sorts of conditions, revitalization, renewal, those language, those words are the same, you know, Is
- [30:02]
Mike Volo
the answer it can't be a total embrace, but is it much more of an. Of an embrace of the wisdom of the market? The market will decide how much of that is. In that does the answer lie.
- [30:22]
Michael Murphy
I try in the book to lay out, especially in a city like Poughkeepsie, a five point strategy or something of that nature, where market adoption is one issue. Although I think we do need visionary creative projects that really change the narrative of the place. That help? That kind of Bilbao effect does help. It does help say, hey, this beat up industrial city that was struggling for so many years has this incredible new initiative that people have invested in and we're really excited about it. It has a cultural impact and starts to change the narrative. I mean, I grew up, I don't know if I can swear on this podcast, but I mean, people call my town a shithole town and that terminology has been used to name nations and elsewhere in our current leadership. And that kind of disparagement had an impact on the people's sense of hope or possibility in the city. Like maybe we are living in a terrible place we have to move out of. So I think changing the brand, changing the narrative, architectural projects, big visionary projects can help with that. But again, they have to be after a sort of groundswell of investment in addressing schools, addressing public infrastructure and green spaces, addressing like the downtown commercial district is critical and of course addressing housing and affordability. The downtown commercial district is the one that I trace the most in the story of Poughkeepsie because I think it's the one that continually shows up in cities throughout the last century and a half where there's all these efforts to revitalize through commerce, downtown districts. And it's a boom and bust cycle. It created the mall, it created downtown malls, it created the shopping mall, the kind of suburban shopping mall. It addressed cities from Paris to Poughkeepsie of efforts to bring in commercial partners. The activity itself, that kind of foot traffic would be the generator. And that happens for a little while and then it dies down as that commercial enterprise sort of ebbs and flows with its popularity. And so I think one of the lessons we learn is that we need commercial districts that are mixed with housing so that there's a sort of interrelationship of living and working and playing in the same place and that there's sort of activity throughout the day and the night instead of just you come to shop and you come to and then you leave home elsewhere. It's a.
- [32:47]
Mike Volo
It's a pretty predictable cycle. Right. First you get a wine shop, then you get a brew pub, then you get a second wine shop and then maybe a vegan bakery. And if those are the only things there, they're good for a while. And the coffee shop. You get the coffee shop. Yeah.
- [33:00]
Michael Murphy
Your axe throwing, you know, center comes in eventually.
- [33:02]
Mike Volo
Yeah. Oh, and you do the thing where you name the building after what it used to be, but with some exceptions. So you have the Trolley Museum and there is the printing house here in New York. You'll never get the. The porn theater. You'll never get a building name. Now afterwards, the bygone era.
- [33:19]
Michael Murphy
Lots of amber sands everywhere.
- [33:21]
Bob Garfield
Yeah. Yeah. We'll be back with more from Michael Murphy after the break.
- [33:34]
Mike Volo
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- [34:56]
Michael Murphy
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- [35:27]
Bob Garfield
welcome back to the gist. We continue Mike's conversation with architect and author Michael Murphy on his book our world. In 10 buildings you're called in to
- [35:38]
Mike Volo
build a hospital in Rwanda. How do you start establishing the dream board of that project? Like I know what it became. The pictures are in the book and you take me through much of your thought process and the wall being used. There's rock in the wall that is not only sourced from, but reflects the local conditions. It's big, it's area, I understand that, but it just seems in terms of, well, where do we start? A very daunting challenge. How do you figure out where to start?
- [36:12]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, good question. Maybe you can set a little context for how that happened, if that's all right. Yeah, so I tell the story in the book, but I was a student of architecture. I was just beginning my journey trying to learn what it meant and I was admittedly a little frustrated with with what I was learning. It was a lot about the kind of brilliance of individual architects and less about the communities in which it was being placed or serving. And I had the chance to meet this amazing doctor named Paul Farmer, who's a sort of visionary advocate for universal healthcare for communities all over the world. And his work, famously described in the book by Tracy Kidder, who also just passed this year, called Mountains Beyond Mountains, I had read when I was a student in college and anyway, he's sort of legendary, was also someone I admired and he was giving a talk when I was in my first semester of architecture school and I went to see him and interestingly enough, he was talking about all the buildings that he was building and the healthcare they were providing, but he was talking about it through buildings, and they were building clinics and hospitals, but also housing for people in Rwanda and in Malawi and Haiti. And I found this really fascinating. I said, it occurred to me that he was describing architecture through a healthcare lens, where I was learning architecture as a sort of monumental lens, that it's individual genius as opposed to this delivery of fundamental public rights and services. Architecture is critical. The building of housing and hospitals is critical for us to deliver our fundamental services, our rights to this community. And that framing was unique to me. I hadn't really heard it within the academy, and I asked him who was working on afterwards, who he's working with in the architectural world, how I could maybe work for them. And he said, architects. No one from the architectural community has ever reached out to see how they can be helpful. I drew the last hospital on a napkin. I've done it ourselves. We've had to figure it out ourselves. Where have you been? He said to me, you know, and I thought that was like, you know, as a naive, inexperienced student, I thought that was just like a shocking revelation. Like, what is the disconnect here? So, yeah, I know that's a little
- [38:32]
Mike Volo
bit to hospitals drawn on napkins, by the way. You can tell.
- [38:37]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, I mean, you know, there's all sorts of questions here that we could ask about, like, you know, what did we miss? But, you know, the heroic effort to construct things for survival or for need is. Is something we should laud and recognize as actually a whole world of building that's going on without the profession of architects, actually, is the conclusion, if this guy couldn't get those services, then who is well known? What about all of the other communities around the world who are figuring out how to build things to survive and they don't have the services? So there's this amazing huge disconnect between where we are working, who we are working for in the architectural world, how you're getting work, who you're serving, who's paying you, and then all of this other work that's happening around the world in great need of those services, and that disconnect not happening. And so that's where I decided to leave school. I applied for a grant. I got a grant from the school, and I went and worked with Dr. Farmer and his team, and he invited me to work in Rwanda, which in 2007, unlike all the rest of the world that was stopping their building projects, was actually doing an enormous amount of new building coming out of the genocide of 1997, 94, excuse me. And rebuilding their country. And they weren't kind of trapped in the global economic macroeconomic climate as much as other countries were. And so they were investing in architecture and buildings, hospitals, schools, housing, et cetera.
- [40:09]
Mike Volo
So where do you start?
- [40:10]
Michael Murphy
Yeah, so that's the bet. That's the preamble. And then as the project worked, then I went back to school and Dr. Farmer called me and he said, look, the government wants us to build a brand new hospital in the north of the country. We've done it before. We'd like you to join our team and come and help us figure it out so we can improve what we've done in the past. It'll be really the largest project they'd ever built. And so that's where I said, well, I don't know how to do it, but you've done it, so of course I'm in and I'll learn from you and I'll bring what we can. And so I left school, I went and worked for Partners in Health in Rwanda, and I sort of leaned on their team of doctors. I moved into the site where they were building it on this northern hilltop in this town called Barrera. I had a group of friends from school. They're also assisting and helping where they could. People in the professional community were assisting if I had questions, mentors, colleagues, graphic designers that I needed help from were contributing. But in the end of the day, I was living with the doctors. I was immersed in that community. I was working with this builder who had worked, worked for them, named Bruce Nizet. And we were asking every question, how do you rethink a hospital ward so that it doesn't make people sicker? There's a lot of airborne disease happening at that period of time around tuberculosis. How do you rethink emergency room? What's the waiting area like? Having this team of doctors and physicians who had worked in both rural healthcare settings and at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. You had actually a great resource of expertise that we could tap and say, okay, this is the best way to set up the sequence of surgical care and outpatient care. And this is the best way to think about the nursing station within a broader medical ward when we can't have individualized rooms, because actually in that setting, patients are getting sicker when they're isolated because there's not enough care coverage. Or this is the best way to think about the ambulance drop off and the kind of emergency situation. So it's a very Interesting set of reconsiderations of the basic tenets of what a hospital should be. And that allowed us to design it together in partnership. And in doing so, I started this nonprofit organization that continued to carry it forward and finish the construction by 2011.
- [42:32]
Mike Volo
Yeah. And once you establish yourself with the rwandan hospital contract, you fall into the glory that is the Haitian cholera hospital and treatment center. What did you learn from the first that translated to the second, I think.
- [42:50]
Michael Murphy
Yeah. So then, because as a nonprofit and I'm working on healthcare, and then I started getting employees and raising money and having a bigger team, the folks that would call were like, we're in an emergency situation. How can you assist in this condition? It turned out there was a lot of need. And in Haiti, after the earthquake, and subsequently, about a year later, the cholera epidemic, there was a vast need in country for the entire architectural community and building community to address what was an incredible devastation of the built environment. I often said two lessons here, Mike. One was, the Haitian earthquake was around 250,000 people were killed, and they were killed by a failure of buildings, Buildings that collapsed on them. They weren't structurally sound. They were shortcuts taken in the time of rebar. There weren't codes and compliance. I mean, it was the built environment, which ultimately was the death blow. That was the first lesson. I think the second lesson was that within that failure of that infrastructure, that people were getting sicker. So the cholera epidemic broke, and it was so severe because of a failure of basically a failed sewage treatment system. They had won a sewage treatment facility in port au prince. It was often shut and broken. The piped system was not meeting every neighborhood. The outbreak happened in the kind of rural countryside and made its way into the city. And cholera kind of took. Went viral. It took fire, and it was contaminating so many people in so many places that it was the failure of that built infrastructure which caused this disease outbreak. This lesson is historical. The first cholera outbreaks that took over cities in the 19th century. There's this great book called ghost maps that was written about. This story is one of the drivers of what changed cities. It brought on the sanitation movement in the 1850s. It brought on things like central park and sewer systems and changes to housing policy. It was the cities that were getting emptied because of cholera and other diseases. And people were moving up to, like, the Hudson valley, moving up out of the cities into the countryside because it was too dangerous to live in the dense conditions of the urban environment. And so we learned those historical lessons are now being applied to a very contemporary condition. And I realized it was the buildings that were causing people to get sicker. So if that's the case, we have to ask that question. Can they make people healthier as well? A lesson from Rwanda around airborne disease making a hospital that allows us to breathe better translated to in this case diarrheal disease or contaminated water. Diseases that allow people to get healthier based on its relationship to access to clean water and sanitation.
- [45:53]
Mike Volo
Yeah. So There are about 6000, 7000 hospitals in the United States. There's about 70000 restaurants in the United States. Architects understand when you get a contract to build a restaurant that the hostess station, the host station could go here or there, the bar could go in these four spaces. The serving stations have to go in these six spaces, 12 spaces, whatever it is, there's a lot of innovation. There's a lot of people applying their crafts. People get ideas from other people with great ideas, they borrow ideas. There's a lot of iteration, there's a lot of innovation. Hospitals, many fewer opportunities for innovation. I was looking up the world figures. Very hard to define what's a restaurant on the world scale. But let's say it's something like 100 to 1 like it is in the United States. Does this mean medical facilities, hospitals just don't have the opportunity to innovate and iterate and cross pollinate with these great ideas that residential homes are just restaurants do?
- [47:02]
Michael Murphy
It's a good question. I have two answers to that. I mean the first answer is
- [47:10]
Bob Garfield
let's
- [47:10]
Michael Murphy
just put it out there that like hospitals are of the most expensive pieces of architecture that are built. I mean they are, you know, I think in, I think Mass General's building a two and a half billion dollar bed tower right now. It's about to open. And you know, they're in the billions of dollars, these big projects. So that already predetermines who's going to win these contracts. And I often say there's five firms in America that do every hospital. That alone answers your question which is like, okay, hospitality spaces, not hospitals. The same kind of root word here. Why are they so different? Is a really important question. Hospitality spaces are famously fickle and quick. Restaurants don't survive. And so they put a big investment in changing the space. Try to make it attractive, try to make it safe, stylish. You know, you see a lot of millennium pink showing up in them. Or then there's these arched windows. It was a kind of fascinating.
- [48:03]
Mike Volo
Instagram is basically making everyone look the same yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [48:07]
Michael Murphy
You know, so there's a turnover in that, that is part of the business model of the, of the hospitality space. So there's clearly a space, clearly a way that many more architects and designers are working on hospitality realm than on hospitals because they don't have access to work on those big, huge, dynamic and comprehensive projects. That being said, there is an enormous amount of, so there's some loss, I think, in that not having that kind of iteration and evolution testing new environments within the medical sphere. On the other hand, I also, and I kind of my last book, the Architecture of Health, which kind of traces the history of hospital architecture, I did find that a lot of innovation in buildings has happened sometimes first in the hospital. Some big ideas that come out in the way in which we might think about cities or addressing things like I mentioned sanitation, or addressing big medical crises find their way into the hospital first because of the risks to our health and our livelihood. And so even though the hospital seems like often the most stale and least innovative place, there are subtle and important changes that might happen within them that are addressing, let's say, reactions or responses to current public health crises. If that's the cholera epidemic, if it's tuberculosis, if it's the increase in medical equipment in the mid century and innovation like the Salk Institute, if it's the big behemoth hospitals that were built in the 70s after the megastructure idea that came out in the post war era, they're always in reaction to the big paradigmatic shifts in cities and in culture. You find a lot of innovation in the hospital, or you can sort of read the hospital as a reaction to big paradigm shifts in culture. That being said, Paul Farmer's quote to me that I put in the book is why is it that the kind of worst hospitality spaces in the world are still better than some of our best hospitals? And I, I think that still resonates with me, which is the things that designers care about and are thought to think about or are given luxury to think about, like let's say in a hotel lobby. What's the feeling of the couch that you're sitting on, or what's the lighting condition or what's the vibe of the place, or what's the door handle like, all the kind of sensory, sensual characterizations of our sensory environment, the things that we experience and touch. A lot of that has been removed or not even thought about. When you think about these medical spaces, which are sanitized, designed against litigation, are super intentional around, let's say, being able to clean them but not necessarily being able to experience them. They're really hard workplaces and they lack a sense of dignity in the design of the spaces. They might function really well, but they don't really serve our soul, is another way to put it.
- [51:07]
Mike Volo
The book is called our world in 10 buildings. It is memoir in more than a way. It is a memoir organized from Michael Murphy's house that he grew up in, all the way through these projects that he works on. And we come full circle with his father's trips to, as his father was dying, his trips to architectural spaces that were important to him. Subtitle is how architecture defines who we Are and how we Live Michael, thank you so much.
- [51:39]
Michael Murphy
Mike, thank you for the great conversation.
- [51:47]
Mike Volo
That's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. Jeff Craig does How To Ben Astaire is our booking coordinator. Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list. And Michelle Pesca is extraordinary in her role as coo. Thanks for listening.