Most everyone who knows me (even a little bit) knows that I am a huge fan of Ira Glass and of This American Life. So when the Lost Buildings DVD became available, it didn’t take me long to order it.

Lost Buildngs is a collaboration between Ira Glass and Chris Ware (author of "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth") that tells "the true story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960′s and 70′s when they were being torn down."

All that said, this quote below (transcribed but not verbatim. I’ve edited for clarity) by Ira on the topic of storytelling from the DVD extras where he talks about putting the story together kind of struck me.

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"And in early drafts of this, we would actually play tape of Tim telling the story, but it was too slow to be at the beginning. It meant that you wouldn’t get to any pictures for two minutes. So that didn’t seem like it would work…although Chris and I went back and forth on that a lot.

I have to say that I strongly resisted the idea that you would tell the Pentwater, Michigan story…some version of it, even in abbreviated form at the beginning of the whole piece and then come back to it…because in my training, in radio, you never repeat. You never reiterate like that. You don’t cycle back on a story and retell it…and so it just went against every instinct.

And in fact if you were to just listen to the slideshow without actually looking at the images and try to imagine it over the radio, it doesn’t work at all. It’s too repetitive. In fact if you wanted to do this story on the radio, you’d have to start the whole thing at, I think, with the Mies van der Rohe section. You’d have to start with the most surprising anecdote and then you could kind of work backward to some of when he was a little kid and in his school and some of the other stuff that happens and then forward to the Richard Nickel stuff.

But the way that this is structured totally would not work on the radio…"

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If you are interested, you can purchase the Lost Buildings DVD here.