Attics & Basements

Flightless Bird

David Farrier

Society & Culture, Documentary, Comedy

4.9 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Flightless Bird, David Farrier realizes that New Zealand doesn’t have attics or basements, so sets out to discover why so many of America’s 333 million homes do. David talks to Stephen Fox, an architectural historian and a lecturer at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, who explains the practical reasons for these spaces, as well as why they’ve turned into habitable spaces. David then talks to filmmaker and architect Giorgio Angelini about what these spaces mean culturally to Americans, as paradoxically a place of safety and warmth but also of mystery and horror. The two of them discuss various formative experiences to be found in the attic, before David turns back to the egg episode, attempting to get closure with his best friend Rosabel following an incident where he cracked an egg over her head. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm David Farrier, and New Zealand are accidentally marooned in America, and I want to figure out what makes this country tick.
0:07.0	Something I still marvel at here is the scale of America.
0:11.0	For example, back in New Zealand, we've got about 5 million people. of America's
0:15.0	3rd and 3rd3 million people.
0:16.0	Compared with America's 333 million people.
0:20.0	And most of those 333 million Americans live in one of the 142 million homes that have been built here.
0:28.0	Back in New Zealand, there are just under 2 million houses.
0:32.0	Ah yes, the humble house, the home, the place where we eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, clip our
0:40.1	toe nails, raise families, watch TV and listen to podcasts.
0:45.0	Oh, is where the heart is, and my heart is anywhere you are. Home is where the heart is, sang Elvis.
0:56.0	But of course you also find other things in the American home besides vital internal organs.
1:02.0	You can find bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, lounges, patios,
1:06.9	an assortment of rooms that we spend a great deal of our lives in. But I've discovered
1:11.8	that there are places in the American home
1:14.0	that you do not find in the New Zealand home,
1:17.0	two of them specifically.
1:19.0	One exists above and the other below.
1:22.0	One gets very hot, the other gets very cold. And it's to these
1:26.9	mysterious places that flightless bird turns to today. So find that flashlight
1:32.1	and get ready to clamber either up or down, because this is
1:36.8	the Attics and Basements episode.
1:38.8	Fight this.
	...

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