• About
  • Episodes
  • Support the Show
  • Bookshop

    • 91. Brian LaRossa

    Sep 12, 2018

    Brian LaRossa is a designer, illustrator, writer, and reader. He’s a design director at Scholastic, writer for Design Observer, and on the adjunct faculty at CUNY. In this episode, Brian and Jarrett talk about his early resistance to the design world and how discovering its history and culture opened up a new love for the discipline. They also talk about how he started writing, his love of reading, and the similarities between his writing process and design process.

    Scratching the Surface is made possible entirely by listener support.

    Support the show on Patreon!

    Latest Episodes:

    201. Charles Saumarez Smith

    Charles Saumarez Smith is the author of The Art Museum in Modern Times, an architectural history of art museums. He previously was the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London and before this served as director of both the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery. In this conversation, Jarrett and Charles talk about the relationship between architecture and museums, the role of the museum director, and administration as a form of research.

    Listen →

    200. Jarrett Fuller

    In this special episode celebrating both Scratching the Surface’s fifth anniversary and our 200th episode, Jarrett turns the tables on himself to answer questions submitted by listeners like who would he like to bring back from the dead to interview? How’s the show changed in five years? What’s the role of design school? What did he want to be in middle school? What non-design books influenced his thinking?

    Listen →

    199. Esther Choi

    Esther Choi is a multidisciplinary artist and architectural historian. In 2019, she published Le Corbuffet, a Fluxus-inspired artist's book that adopts the form of a cookbook and in 2020, she started Office Hours, a socially-engaged initiative that cultivates the sharing of knowledge among practitioners who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In this episode, Esther and Jarrett talk about working between photography and architectural theory, genres of writing, and building a body of work that’s hard to define.

    Listen →