The first of a two part episode exploring Le Corbusier’s infamous and much-derided urban proposals, exhibited in the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion in 1925. In this part, we’re conducting a close reading of ‘Urbanism’ (sometimes known as ‘The City of Tomorrow and its Planning’). We mostly stayed on topic but there are allusions to Camillo Sitte Augustus Welby Pugin’s ‘Comparisons’ Music — Glass Boy ‘WELP’ Lovira ‘All Things Considered’ Loyalty Freak Music ‘Once More With You’ and ‘Waiting TTTT’ Three C...
Feb 13, 2018•54 min
Franz Kafka’s first, and least-finished, novel is an imaginary journey around the USA (a country he never visited). Written in 1912, it’s a fantasy of America at a time when seemed, to Europeans at least, to be the most futuristic (and mysterious) place on Earth. Kafka’s fascination with machinery, technology and engineering is on display in ‘Amerika’, in which the young Karl Rossmann finds himself cut adrift in a land of glass elevators, miles-long traffic jams, endless hotels, filled with deli...
Jan 14, 2018•1 hr 14 min
For our Christmas episode, we're discussing the early Purist villas! Knowing the right people, and a relentless programme of self-publicity yielded a steady stream of clients for Le Corbusier in the early 1920s, and allowed him to explore an architectural complement to Purism, most notably in a pair of houses for art-loving ‘batchelors’ — the Ozenfant Studio and Villa La Roche. We found time to discuss (probably with unwarranted levity, sorry) the death of Le Corbusier’s father George, and his t...
Dec 23, 2017•1 hr 5 min
A new epoch has begun! Le Corbusier’s ‘discovery’ is that the style of future architecture is to be found new inventions of the machine age — planes, cars, ocean liners. But ‘Towards a New Architecture’ is, at its heart, an argument for a fusion of timeless values and contemporary technology — provocatively encapsulated in its juxtaposition of a sports car and the Parthenon. We went through the book in order, focussing on the chapters: The Engineer’s Aesthetic Three Reminders to Architects - Reg...
Dec 13, 2017•1 hr 2 min
We’re in Paris, 1917, where Charles-Edouard Jeanneret is making friends, thinking about sex (and writing enormous letters about it), designing the occasional mechanised abattoir / concrete garden terrace, going bankrupt, trying to sell concrete blocks to postwar society, inventing a new style of painting, launching a highly costly art magazine, and (finally!) acquiring the name under which he would become famous — Le Corbusier! One of us had a very creaky chair in this episode. Also we were drin...
Nov 27, 2017•42 min
We’re taking on the origin story of (for better or worse) the most important architect of the 20th century — Charles-Edouard Jeanneret aka Le Corbusier. His origins — petit bourgeois, Swiss, provincial — can make his eventual rise to world-enveloping notoriety and era-defining influence seem all the more unlikely. We’re digging into his childhood, family, education and travels as a young man before taking on a couple of early projects. We discuss — La Chaux de Fonds Charles L’Eplattanier, his te...
Nov 13, 2017•1 hr 10 min
First announced in 1931, the project for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow evolved into a staggeringly vast and bizarre proposal which stalled during WWII when only the foundations had been completed. A 400m tall neoclassical fantasy topped with a vast statue of Lenin; the Palace would probably, if completed, have still been the tallest building in the world in the year 2000. Forming a counterpart of sorts to our discussion of the Chicago Tribune — the Palace is another worldwide competition o...
Oct 30, 2017•1 hr 26 min
Don’t listen if you haven’t seen the movie yet! We discuss Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. It’s pretty formless and we forgot the names of most of the characters, actors, significant plot entities. You’ll get who we’re talking about it you’ve seen it. We refer in passing to — Moebius & Jodorowsky ‘The Incal’ Vladimir Nabokov ‘Pale Fire’ Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Treasure Island’ Outro — Dharma — Plastic Doll (1982) Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbu...
Oct 23, 2017•36 min
As a postscript to our discussion of Cyberpunk in episodes 20-21, and vaguely looking ahead to the release of the upcoming sequel, we talked about Ridley Scott’s 1982 film ‘Blade Runner’. We were really winging it on the research for this one and as a result it marks a high point for getting key facts completely wrong, including — the name of a key character (see if you can guess which one!), various attributions of ethnicity, dates, names, places, the ending of the book on which it’s based, and...
Sep 16, 2017•54 min
We conclude our discussion of the 1922 Chicago Tribune competition, going through a few of the less favoured entries, and discussing how it’s been seen and understood in the years since. Apologies for some clipping on the audio – we’ve tried to edit most of it out but some is still left. As before, you can see all the entries in this book We discuss the entries of – Walter Gropius (197) Adolf Loos (196) Paul Gerhardt (159 & 160) Saverio Dioguardi (248) Vittorio Pino (252) Alfred Fellheimer &...
Sep 02, 2017•56 min
In 1922, to coincide with its 75th birthday, the Chicago Tribune set out to endow the city with ‘the world’s most beautiful office building’. The results of the design competition have been seen in retrospect less as ‘the ultimate in civic expression’ than as an expression of aesthetic and theoretical crisis within architecture. Hugely varied, bizarre, ingenious and occasionally grotesque, the entries provide a window into a discipline in transformation, as well as into the politics of a new Ame...
Aug 10, 2017•1 hr 3 min
Leaving the waste-strewn Earth behind, we follow the team on their run all the way to its conclusion in orbit. On the way, we cast our eyes over the weed-smelling shanty-hulk of Zion, the sunlit Condé Naste-styled resort-perfection of Freeside, and the gloomy, Victorian-styled warren of the Villa Straylight. Fewer mattresses, more carpets. Music – ‘Heliograph’ ‘CGI Snake’ ‘Wonder Cycle’ and ‘Oxygen Garden’ from the album ‘Divider’ by Chris Zabriskie – from the Free Music Archive Outro – Hypnosis...
Jun 14, 2017•58 min
We’re back in dystopia, soaking up the glamour, danger and decadence of the cyberpunk city. We’re reading William Gibson’s seminal science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), which combines the pace of a thriller with a vivid and almost archaeological view of the technological and material fabric of the near future city – glue, chipboard, broken TVs, epoxy resin, dirty water, and a strange profusion of foam mattresses. Gibson has spoken about the city as a ‘compost heap’ – and we’re sifting throug...
May 23, 2017•1 hr 10 min
During the 1960s and 70s, the French architect Jean Renaudie designed and built a series of projects in which he attempted to upend the staid and formulaic model of postwar slab-block mass housing. Architecture, for Renaudie, had to acknowledge and enshrine human being's 'Right to Difference'. But this didn't mean discarding the achievements or social ideology of modernism – rather, as part of a wider European project of dissent, critique and reformation, he formulated his own daring formal solu...
May 04, 2017•1 hr 26 min
A fuzzy empire of blur, a low grade purgatory, a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends… We're discussing Junkspace (2001), Rem Koolhaas's notoriously elliptical wander through the dystopian and formless morass of early 21st retail architecture that seems gradually to be devouring the city, and the world. In keeping with the essay, the episode is radically unstructured, only barely makes sense, and is held together largely by hyperbole. We discussed – – Rem Koolhaas and OMA – The b...
Apr 17, 2017•1 hr 4 min
Michelangelo’s incredibly long career meant that he was old for a very long time, and the idea of death, and of what comes afterwards, hang over many of the projects he worked on late in life. We discuss his pivotal role in the design of St Peter’s in Rome, the sombre and terrible ‘Last Judgement’ in the Sistene Chapel, and a series of fragmentary late drawings, designs and sculptures which seem to be pointing to the future and the past at the same time. It’s been about four hours of solid Miche...
Apr 06, 2017•1 hr 18 min
We continue our discussion of the architecture of Michelangelo Buonarotti with an exploration of two of his most important projects – the Laurentine Library, in which his sculptural understanding of form and mass is most powerful and disconcerting – and the Piazza del Campidoglio, an urban ensemble which would become a definitive reference for the idea of civic space. In between George extemporises for about 20 minutes on late medieval Italian history despite having done no research, and we dip ...
Mar 15, 2017•1 hr 6 min
The first of a three-parter in which we try to understand the work, and myth, of Michelangelo Buonarroti, referred to by followers as ‘the Divine’, and genuinely described by his biographer as a messenger sent from God to stop people from doing bad art. It’s a long recording and we may have spent a bit too long talking about the ‘New Sacristy’ in Florence. But the 15 minute, rhapsodic description of David’s perfect body? We regret it Not At All. Some slightly excessive chat about a particular pa...
Mar 06, 2017•1 hr 26 min
The second part of your discussion of Ayn Rand's extremely long fantasy about the 'ideal man' and the buildings he makes. The book gets weirder and more political as it goes on, and we meet Rand's Mary-Sue character, the long-suffering helmet-haired ice princess Dominique Francon. All these things make the book worse. Features music by Chris Zabriskie – 'Heliograph' from the album 'Divider', 'We always thought the future would be kind of fun' from the album 'The Dark Glow of Mountains' and 'Cyli...
Feb 13, 2017•1 hr 12 min
This isn't one of those book reviews where you're expected to read the book first – we did it so you don't have to. Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead' is a 750 page long novel which at times is physically painful to read. It's a supposedly 'philosophical' book in which none of the motivations and actions of the characters make any sense. People have long conversations which are nearly impossible to follow. Rand maunders on about apparently random bits of mise-en-scene for pages. Even if you were goin...
Jan 30, 2017•57 min
The second half of Aldo Rossi's career. We discuss his role on the ushering in of the age of po-mo, a few selected monstrosties, and do listener correspondance (one email – that's how easy it is to get read out). Music includes: ‘Β15’ and 'B16' from the album ‘ΝΕΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΚΟΚΚΑΛΑ’ by Kοκκαλα, from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org
Jan 22, 2017•43 min
Aldo Rossi’s strange and elegiac early buildings – from the tiny Monument to the Partisans, to the vast, unfinished cemetery at Modena – set him on a path toward the widespread fame and influence he would achieve during the 1980s. In many ways, his architectural vision seems to arrive already fully formed – the strange geometry, the stripped down, abstracted versions of familiar types. We explore these varied works, and how his ideas he was formulating about urban memory and history became works...
Dec 24, 2016•57 min
A valiant attempt to understand Aldo Rossi's 1966 'L'Architettura della Citta', a book which both Luke & George have owned for years, but which neither have actually read until now (the pictures are nice, and the spine is an attractive orange colour). Aldo Rossi's celebrity began with this book, and a certain mythic image of him – gloomy, nostalgic, perverse – is widely recognised within architectural history. But what does the book actually say? We explore monuments, urban artifacts, fragme...
Dec 06, 2016•1 hr 1 min
The collapse of the Imperial German state after WW1 seemed an opportunity for Taut and his fellow visionaries to become architect-leaders themselves, and shape the form of post-war society. But faced with widespread political violence, and all at sea in dealing with bureaucratic power, Taut and his fellow avant-gardists retreated together into the secret group correspondance – 'The Crystal Chain'. The final episode in our three part exploration of the Glass Dream, including ecstatic visions, the...
Oct 31, 2016•1 hr 3 min
Paul Scheerbart is dead, and Europe has dissolved into conflict, but the Glass Dream continues. Luke & George explore Bruno Taut's manifestos, the dissolution of the dirty old cities, the transfiguration of the Alps into crystal, and the uniting of the people around the new religion – architecture. Featuring Alpine Architecture (1917), The City Crown (1919), The Dissolution of the Cities & the Earth – a Good Dwelling (1920), and an original audio-only translation of Die Weltbaumeister: A...
Oct 24, 2016•42 min
We begin a three-part exploration of the Glass Paradise – an early 20th vision of a better world – starting off with Bruno Taut’s extraordinary Glashaus (1914), and the even stranger text which inspired it, Paul Scheerbart’s ‘Glassarchitektur’. Conceived as a model for a new and more beautiful way of living – the Glashaus is a glimpse at a future that never came to pass, filled with jewel-like cites and kaleidoscopic colour. Also, vacuum cleaners as insect exterminators, spinning crystal globes ...
Sep 27, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Luke & George visit and discuss Switch House, the new extension to Tate Modern – and the architects of both it, and the original museum, Herzog & de Meuron. Plus – thoughts on the machine tool utopia also known as Switerland, design process, and the centrality of the spreadsheet in modern architecture. Music: ‘Holy Roller’ from the album ‘Shangri-La (Instrumentals)’ by YACHT. From the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org Look at pictures on our Google+ page: https://plus.google.com...
Sep 19, 2016•1 hr 14 min
Luke & George read and discuss Pliny the Younger’s two luxurious (but still so modest!) villas, as described in his letters. The box hedges have been trimmed, and dinner is swimming around on the back of a wooden duck. We discussed the essay ‘The Villa as Paradigm’ by James Ackerman, from Perspecta, Vol. 22, Paradigms of Architecture (1986) pp10-31 Music: ‘Curiousity’ and ‘Quizitive' from the album ‘Music For Podcasts’ by Lee Rosevere. From the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org/musi...
Sep 05, 2016•1 hr 13 min
Exploring the history and architecture of the inimitable Barbican Estate, the joys of brutalism, concrete, late modernist planning, concealed historical references, getting lost, etc. Includes a couple of short forays into the imagined lives of inhabitants and visitors... Music includes: ‘Β6’ from the album ‘ΝΕΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΚΟΚΚΑΛΑ’ by Kοκκαλα and ‘Heavy Traffic’ from the album ‘The Happiest Days Of Our Lives’ by Three Chain Links. Both from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org Look at pi...
Aug 29, 2016•1 hr 3 min
George & Luke survey three dystopian cities; the glass perfection of Yvegny Zamyatin’s ‘We’, the consumer World State of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, and the shattered ruin of George Orwell’s ‘1984’. Competing visions of technological progress gone awry, and the real-world ideas that inspired them. We read: Yvegeny Zamyatin ‘We’ tr. Clarence Brown (Penguin, 1993) Aldous Huxley ‘Brave New World’ (1932) George Orwell ‘1984’ (1948) Music: ‘Shadows’, ‘Fearweaver’, ‘Bindings’ and ‘Demons’ f...
Aug 24, 2016•1 hr 35 min
