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A Lecture by John Lobell

“Visionary Creativity,” a lecture by John Lobell at Pratt Institute, School of Architecture, September 29, 2016. CLCIK HERE TO SEE IT ON YOUTUBE. Or search on YouTube for “John Lobell Visionary Creativity 29” WHERE: Pratt Institute, School of Architecture, Higgins Hall, 61 St. James Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238 What is Creativity? Everything we do at Pratt is based on […]

“Visionaries,” a New Radio Program with John Lobell

  Wow, I’m doing a “radio” show! Join me starting Monday, September 12, and every Monday at 10 AM, Eastern Time, for “Visionaries,” on the internet on the Progressive Radio Network. Find us at: http://prn.fm (In case you are not free Mondays at 10 AM, can listen to any of my back shows, as soon […]

Re-reading Carver Mead

  With some summer time on my hands, I am belatedly reading Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, the story of the computer technology developed at Xerox PARC — the personal computer, the mouse, the graphical user interface, the laser printer, Ethernet, computer graphics and video, etc. (Xerox could […]

Cities and Economic Creativity

It is Jane Jacobs’s 100th birthday and she is deservedly being widely celebrated. But in many cases by people who have not read her books. She is evoked in support of liberalism, but her economics were anything but. In The Economy of Cities she shows that economic planning leads to stagnation, while a free market […]

Self-Driving Cars: The Real Threat

Everything you have heard about self-driving cars misses the point. (They are sometimes called autonomous cars, but that term definitely misses the point.) Self-driving cars are coming quicker than we thought. We have long been hearing about Google’s self-driving cars in California, but now every major car company is working on them, and the New […]

Reading from “Visionary Creativity”

See a reading from my book, Visionary Creativity: How New Worlds are Born, on YouTube. The reading was at the Pratt Manhattan Campus, Presented by The Fund for Pratt Learning Salon in December, 2015. You can get the book on Amazon and Barns & Noble.

Becoming Creative

In college I read a lot of Andre Gide. The Immoralist — wow! I still look at it occasionally, although these days I am more likely to rewatch Jack Nicholson in Wolf. (Same idea.) One of my favorite Gide quotes is, “You have to lose your reputation to save your life.” It came to mind when […]

A Frank Lloyd Wright MOOC

My online course on Frank Lloyd Wright is complete. (It is a MOOC – a Massive Open Online Course.) You can binge watch the whole thing at Open Online Academy (https://www.ooed.org). It is free. This course is hugely comprehensive, looking in detail at Wright’s buildings, but also looking at his life, the context of his […]

The Digital Industrial Revolution and how it will change creativity

by John Lobell It’s ultimately about who we are as human beings! Affordable ($500) 3D printers are everywhere, in schools, in homes, and certainly in the news, but they are only a small part of something bigger. A new way of making things is emerging, variously described as digital fabrication, desktop manufacturing, 3D printing, the […]