The Building Culture Podcast

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#49 Alicia Pederson: How We Designed Families Out of the City

May 26, 2026

Alicia Pederson spent her twenties living in a 16th-century palazzo in Florence, and it changed everything about how she sees cities, density, and what American urbanism has quietly abandoned. She's the founder of Courtyard Urbanist and holds a PhD in English from Northwestern with a specialty in Renaissance pastoral literature, which turns out to be less of a detour and more of a throughline to everything she now advocates for.In this conversation we cover the history of the courtyard bl...

#48 Mike Hathorne: The Great Housing Reversal - It's not a housing shortage, but a mismatch.

May 05, 2026

Mike Hathorne spent 30 years in real estate and development trying to understand why the industry keeps building the wrong thing. His answer is in his book, The Great Housing Reversal.It's not a housing shortage. It's a housing mismatch. 64% of American households are one or two people. Over half the housing stock has three or more bedrooms. Mike walks through the three simultaneous trends reshaping who needs a home in America, why the development industry hasn't caught up, and wh...

#47 Apollo Workspace: There's a Better Way to Work

April 10, 2026

This episode is a personal one. I sat down with Sarah — my wife, my partner in all of this — to talk about Apollo Workspace: what it is, why we’re building it, and what it means within our larger project, Townsend, in downtown Edmond.We met in the Peace Corps in Uganda, got married after a five-week engagement, and moved to the middle of Oklahoma so I could learn structural masonry from a master mason. Building Culture started around the same time as our marriage, and a decade later, we’re bu...