EP. 75 TIKTOK CONTENT CREATION AND ACCESSIBLE ARCHITECTURE CRITIQUE with Louisa Whitmore TikTok Content Creator and Documentary Host

ABOUT LOUISA WHITMORE:

TIK TOK: 

LOUISA'S BIO:

Louisa Whitmore is an architecture content creator on TikTok with over 350K followers, as well as the host of the cable television documentary series “The Nature of Design.” 

A former commentator for the USModernist podcast, Whitmore has also worked as a live radio host and PSA producer at CHMA 106.9FM, the local radio station at Mount Allison University, where she’s currently an honors student studying international relations and French. 

She enjoys telling stories, and is passionate about sustainable design.

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 75… and my conversation with Louisa Whitmore. 

On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

he NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

Louisa Whitmore is a TikTok creator phenom whose content is about architecture. With almost 400 thousand followers her no holds-barred, straight from the heart and to the point commentary about the buildings she loves and loves to hate, brings a user experience point of view and accessible critique into the mainstream.

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

 

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The great thing about doing this podcast is it gives me an opportunity to rethink some of the assertions that have held to be true and cross check whether in fact they are immutable or whether there is room for challenging myself and maybe digging into some subtleties and nuances… and seeing things a different way.

Like for example the idea of criticism – who does it and its value…

I have to admit I haven't been particularly fond of the idea of critics for a very long time. This would be generally true of the kind who dole out the negative kind of commentary.

Years ago when commenting on something, I think it was some art piece, and my son said to me “…dad why is it that you never really say you hate anything…”which I sort of thought was kind of funny then. 

I think I responded “…well because I don't really hate anything… I try to always view things from the other side - a different point of view. I try to get beyond the visceral reaction and look to design principles and comment from a place of applying principles to the work and see how they line up…and then make a comment that is based yes on whether I simply like it, the colors, shapes, energy, feeling , may be a message it is trying to impart AND  whether I can see the value in it based on principles determined to be generally accepted by experts in the domain…” so yeah I don’t really hate things…

If I apply the idea of casting judgement on art, music, architecture… it got me thinking… again…

What is the value of judgement? Is it to determine the appropriateness of something to a particular context or challenge?

I have my favorite architects and artists and musical performers, I like different styles and periods. 

But I don’t listen to heavy metal (though my sons love it). I don’t know that I can say that I hate it. Perhaps I just don’t understand it and maybe if I did, it still wouldn’t jibe with me.

It just doesn’t go in my body well. It’s a sensory mismatch.

I don’t hate it – It makes me agitated. So, I just don’t listen to it. 

And I guess you could say the same thing for certain genres of art.

For example… I'm not particularly crazy about a lot of contemporary art.

I have a hard time understanding a performance artist dipping her hair in paint and swinging aloft from a rope while her hair drags across a canvas and the painting while on lookers wrapped in dimly lit light bulbs stand slightly by  selling for millions of dollars… it isn't something I quite get. 

And I know that authorized replicas of the Marcel Duchamp sculpture called the “Fountain” - which is a urinal - sell for somewhere between 3 and $4 million each 

and here's the kicker... apparently because the original has been lost the financial the value of the original piece is unknown and might be considered as being priceless. 

I don't know… it sort of leaves me just trying too hard... knowing I'm falling profoundly short of ascending to the intellectualized rarefied air that somehow makes this sort of thing makes sense. 

And I also suspect that if I'm voicing these concerns or questions that I am likely to get a lot of people commenting that my remarks point out my ignorance, that I just don't understand and I would …well…agree with them.

I’m ok with that. Really.

And I think I'm not alone in this category of not understanding contemporary art and the extraordinary prices that contemporary art paintings fetch at auctions 

and then again maybe if I did, I still wouldn't spend $25 million on a Rothko painting.

The thing about critics, I think, is that we entrust these individuals with being in the know, of having deep insight, knowledge or experience into the making of the art. 

That these are people who understand its value and relevancy to culture and somehow able to unfold the deep meaning in the work whatever format the creativity comes in and to bestow upon us their opinion as if it is fact.

The challenge of course is that I think there may be an ignorance in the public and that the deeper inner meaning of things is somehow held in reserve for the creators of the work or select few who follow it.

But I've always had a challenge with the idea that the critic seems to have the extraordinary power to completely destroy the creative work as well as raise it to high levels of adulation and praise.

I think that in some ways we have come to trust to the critic as certainly knowing more than we do and therefore what they say about a particular piece of art or architecture should be taken as truth and the presumed value of the creation lies in whether their commentary is positive or negative.

How many people have not gone to see a movie because it only got 2 stars… and who said it should only have two stars?

Maybe I would have found the comedy hilarious… but not the critic.

I often don't even check reviews by the masses on restaurant or hotel booking sites and if I do read the reviews, I do it very carefully. 

I look to see what it was that these people did or didn't like. What it was that made their experience a must see or a definite red tomato. 

Personally, I dig to see if there is anything at a lower level that suggests what was driving the positive or negative review? What it was in this message that this particular critic is trying to convey?

I've often thought that to be able to criticize art or other forms of creative invention you'd have to understand what it was the maker was intending to convey.

You'd have to understand the basic ideas, for example, of composition to be able to determine whether a Jackson Pollock or a Kandinsky or a Basquiat was worth all the fuss and on what basis you were making the comments about the work.

I guess it’s not all critics that I have a problem with but maybe more those who simply present negative opinions. 

And it’s not like I should even care that critic X didn’t like thing Y. It was their opinion. Okay so they have an opinion. 

The challenge is the uninformed may come to accept the opinion as fact and turn away from somethings simply because some one says its not good.

I guess the role of the professional critic is to study and assess the value of a creative work and pass judgment on the product based on facts and logical assertions. This is kind of like knowing a bit about composition before offering an opinion the write something off.

It seems to me that the idea of a critic is to connect ideas, arrive at reasonable conclusions and perhaps open avenues for discussing new directions and fostering an awareness of ideas and cultural trends.

It also seems to me that the role of the critic is to challenge our general assumptions about things to get us to look more deeply at our assertions and to get us to not simply accept things at face value but to continue to search for excellence, challenge the status quo, in all of the things that we bring into the world so that we don't fill it with the mundane or banal.

There's something about the critic as ‘educator’ - increasing our collective level of understanding of things, pointing out where things might likely be improved and offering positive commentary on what might be a series of next steps in order to develop the output and make it better - that I align with.

And I know that the idea of making it ‘better’ is full of all manner of subtext and necessity to consider contextual considerations… ‘better’ for whom, for what and why?

And maybe this is where I mostly land on the idea of the value of the critique is that of using constructive criticism for the value of enhancing people's understanding of a particular subject or giving the creator tools to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and make it better.

Jazz master saxophonist David Liebman wrote a concise piece on his website called “The Critic Dilemma: Criticism vs. Review”. He describes many of the same ideas about who’s making he comments, are they objective facts or subjective opinions, and why should we trust one critic’s opinion over another? Liebman differentiates between critique and a review:

“…When the writer’s opinion and taste is the focal point, this constitutes a critique. On the other hand, a review should be the dissemination of information with the desired intention being elucidation. The idea is that with this information, the listener is equipped to form his own opinion…”.

And this is where this episode’s guest Louisa Whitmore begins to fit into the story.

When Louisa was 16 years old she began to share architecture commentary on Tik Tok. She blew up the social media sphere with posts that were personal and occasionally pointed. 

She came at her critiques of buildings not from the expert or architectural practioner point of view but from that of the user, the general public mindset.

She didn’t profess to be a building expert, to have deep knowledge in construction but rather to simply be part of the general public who experienced the built environment every day but who had little to nothing to do with how buildings got there in the first place.

Her negative commentary on 432 Park Avenue - the luxury condo building designed by Rafael Viñoly and SLCE Architects – lit up the digisphere with 100s of thousands of followers lining up behind her to voice their impressions of this building. 

Most of them not very good I might add. Which was actually ok since there was a ton of press – not particularly good I might add – about problems with the building. Now, Louisa didn’t know about these issues about the engineering, the building swaying (which would be natural by the way) and other problems but felt vindicated nevertheless with the press that effectively substantiated her intuitive feelings about this super-tall condo on the Central Park’s edge.

I see her posts more like David Leibman’s construct of the ‘Review’ – “…that with this information, the listener is equipped to form his own opinion…”.

And opinions her followers had. 1000’s of them.

In the spirit of “…the dissemination of information with the desired intention being elucidation…” Whitmore turned her attention to projects thatfocused on Biophilia and how buildings with ample integration of plants seemed to simply feel better. 

Her noteriaty on Tik Tok, articulate whit, intuition and ability to articulate the ‘person on the street’s’ perception of the built environment, landed her the role as host of “the cable television documentary series “The Nature of Design”.

Over the course of a number of episodes Whitmore tours properties talking about biophilic principles and with the support of a variety of experts ranging from architects to neuroscientists she dives into the science of how buildings with a biophilic approach effect our well-being…

Whitmore is called a teenage architecture critic. While her rise on social media platforms may have been based on the building she loved to hate, it seems that she is using her notoriety to review and elucidate….

 

ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The next level experience design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.