Episode 17: Richard Olcott

Designing museums and concert halls demands a blend of experience, talent, and vision. Richard Olcott, Design Partner at Ennead Architects in New York City, brings the right blend and a sense of play to a serious profession. In this episode we learn about whether, in the face of the pandemic, clients are still lining up (they are), museums will return to business as usual (they won’t), and how the Spanish Flu of 1918 was central to the birth of modernism and the International Style of architecture (wait, what?). We discuss digital tools, the blight of ‘supertalls’ casting shadows across New York’s Central Park, indoor vertical gardens and other moves towards sustainability, whether ‘open office’ designs are doomed, and multiple other topics.