Episode 90: The Container for the Story

Season 3 of Serial is set in the Cleveland Justice Center, which Serial host Sarah Koenig calls “hideous but practical.”

Michael describes it as a
giant tower over a big base which is just big, ungainly, nasty-looking

And Jessica talks about the Brutalist courts tower, which was designed by Prindle, Patrick and Associates and opened in 1976, as
a container for the story — which is, maybe in its own way, a kind of brutalist story. I mean, there’s nothing I’m soft and fuzzy and pretty about what’s going on in the criminal court system in Cleveland.

Prindle, Patrick specialized in designing jails — and at least one Ohio hotel:
if you want to know what what kind of hotel prison architects would design if given the opportunity, just book your next vacation in Columbus and stay at the Hyatt Regency.

Also mentioned this week:

• Phaidon, Atlas of Brutalist Architecture
• Paul Rudolph, Art and Architecture Building, Temple Street Garage
• Georges Perec, Life A User’s Manual
• Lehman & Schmitt, Cuyahoga County Courthouse
• Rick Green, Dawn McCarty, and Tiffany Kary, Bloomberg, Sears Goes Bankrupt, Mired in Debt and Deserted by Shoppers
• Pretenders, My City Was Gone
• Abandoned America, Bell Labs
• Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson, Slate, The Secret History of the Future, From Zero to Selfie 
• Alex Vadukul, New York Times, How Forlini’s Survives the Instagram Horde
• Avery Trufelman, Articles of Interest 
• The Romanoffs on Amazon Prime

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