October 27, 2006
Last week the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum awarded Marianne Cusato the first ever People's Design Award for her work on The Katrina Cottage. With its peaked roof and front porch, the Katrina Cottage is designed to be a permanent, dignified alternative to the FEMA trailer. Kurt Andersen spoke with Cusato in New Orleans last spring.
Tacky architecture can make us cringe. Avant-garde buildings can make us think, "huh?" But according to Alain de Botton, author of The Architecture of Happiness, a well-designed building can be more sublime than most aphrodisiacs. Kurt Andersen asks de Botton which buildings put a smile of his face.
Every year around Halloween, thousands of Americans go to their churches to meet the devil. These "Hell Houses" - designed by Pastor Keenan Roberts - are kind of like haunted houses, but each room gruesomely displays the consequences of sin. Now a secular group of artists and actors have staged a Hell House in the capital of blue state America: New York City. And they got a stamp of approval from Pastor Roberts himself. Peter Crimmins looks at this strange partnership between Christian believers and liberal non-believers.
Autumn is a time for students to hit the books but at Tom Savini's Special Make-Up Effects School in Pennsylvania, it's not books the students are cracking, but heads. A veteran of horror movies like Friday the 13th, Savini teaches students how to make the disgusting riveting, and why fear is their best friend. Matthew Cavnar travels through a dark and scary wood to find out how the tradition of hand-made special effects is staying current in the digital era.
Jack Handey, creator of Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts," worries that he's going to leave behind just another ho-hum skeleton buried in the ground. He offers a few tips on how to make your skeleton live up to its reputation.
The elements of music - melody, rhythm, harmony and so on - are so related they're almost inseparable. But Cuban-born composer Tania Leon is a rhythm-minded sort. She explains to Sara Fishko that she gets rhythm; and not just one rhythm, many rhythms.
Samina Quraeshi grew up in a prominent family in Pakistan in the 1960s. She remembers the exact moment she decided to become a designer: when she saw the tail fins on the American ambassador's car.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
Public
Radio International and
WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
Ken and Lucy Lehman, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation,
DK Eyewitness Travel,
Herman Miller and
Design Within Reach. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
