We're starting a series exploring the work of Andrea Palladio. In his own time, Palladio was a prominent architect based in 16th century Vicenza. Subsequently he's become arguably one of the most influential architects of all history -- defining a style of classical architecture which became the house-style of elites around the world. The most characteristic works in his long career are villas -- country houses on "terra ferma" for the rich merchants of Vicenza and nearby Venice -- though he als...
Feb 21, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast We round off our series on Carlo Scarpa with two projects for Italian consumer electronics dynasties the Olivetti corporation, for whom he designed a famous shop in Piazza San Marco, and the Brion-Vega family for whom he designed an extraordinary cemetery complex. These are two of his most unrestrained, symbolically laden and elaborate projects in which Scarpa's unique approach to architectural form, decoration, materials and narrative are most powerfully evident. Thanks for watching, and all th...
Dec 09, 2021•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Castelvecchio Museum (1959-73) in Verona is an elaborate spatial narrative, weaving together historic structures and ingenious design elements to create a fragmentary and multi-layered story about the site, the city, and the objects contained in it. The project was Carlo Scarpa's largest and longest running, and we go through it at some length. For images, subscribe to us on YouTube . Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please...
Nov 10, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast We talked about Carlo Scarpa's work at the Querini Stampalia foundation (1959-63), a palazzo-museum in Venice. Scarpa's interventions are focussed on the ground floor spaces, including a new entrance bridge, galleries and courtyard garden. There's a very distinctive mixture of restoration and fantasy, historical narration and occasional touches of grooviness. You can watch this episode, including relevant images, on our YouTube channel. Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreo...
Oct 14, 2021•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our first episode on Carlo Scarpa, we're trying something new! We've made a video to accompany the episode that you can find on our YouTube Channel , in which you can watch Luke and George discuss the enigmatic architecture of Carlo Scarpa, accompanied by images of the buildings! Make sure you subscribe on YouTube to keep up to date. This is an experiment, so let us know what you think! We will always put out these main episodes here on the podcast feed, and we will try to keep them accessibl...
Sep 15, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the final episode in our series on Ian Nairn, we discussed the 1967 book 'Britain's Changing Towns' and the BBC television work that has granted Nairn a viral afterlife on YouTube. Here's the Nairn clip from the outro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K-53widcdY You can find all the Nairn tv shows we discussed in the episode by simply searching 'Ian Nairn' on Youtube, and we'll be posting some Nairn clips on the socials over the next couple of weeks. Bonus episode for patreon subscribers on G...
Aug 17, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the second episode of our series on Ian Nairn, we talked about Nairn's London, the 1966 architectural guide to the city which was the critic's magnum opus. We discussed his inimitable prose style, his deep knowledge of the buildings of London, the afterlife of the book and its un-propositional nature. This episode includes clips from a walking tour of the West End that we took with Nairn's London in hand. The full audio tour of the West End will be published on our Patreon for subscribers! Th...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first episode in our new series on the work of architectural critic Ian Nairn. In this first episode we discussed his breakout work for the Architectural Review, Outrage, which railed against 'subtopia', the suburban sprawl of concrete and fencing that Nairn saw ruining the British environment in the decades after World War 2. We also discussed his writings on America, his similarities to Jane Jacobs and his work on Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England. Nairn has become something of a cul...
Jul 12, 2021•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our final episode on Otto Wagner considers his relationship to modernism, asking whether Wagner was a predecessor to modernism. We discussed his most modern building, the sterreichische Postsparkasse or Austrian Postal Savings Bank, like so much in Vienna at this time, a coming together of the old world and the new. Our next series on Ian Nairn will start very soon! Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the sh...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the penultimate episode in our series on Otto Wagner, we discussed Wagner's most famous projects, the art nouveau works produced at the height of the Vienna Secession. We talked about the Majolikahaus , other art nouveau apartment blocks, the Karlsplatz stadtbahn station and his transcendent Kirche am Steinhof designed for a psychiatric hospital with Wagner also masterplanned. There's one more episode to come on Otto Wagner, where we will discuss his relationship to modernism! Our next series...
May 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a preview of our latest bonus episode on Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession, get access to the full episode on our Patreon . In this episode we discussed the work of the Vienna Secession beyond Otto Wagner, particularly the artist Gustav Klimt. The Secession were a group of radical artists who were central to establishing the Art Nouveau in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Klimt's paintings, with their flattened perspectives, hallucinatory colours and heroin-chic female nudes made him fam...
Apr 29, 2021•6 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we talked about the middle stage of Otto Wagner's career, primarily his work on the infrastructure of the city of Vienna. Visit our instagram and Twitter for pictures of the dams, railway stations and bridges that shaped Viennese modernity and provided the infrastructure for this rapidly growing city. Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people fin...
Apr 18, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our second episode on Otto Wagner, we discussed a couple of Wagner's early buildings, specifically the Landerbank in Vienna and the Rumbach Street Synagogue in Budapest. Both are tantalising glimpses of the themes that would dominate his later, most famous works. We then discussed the architectural theory that was being produced in vast quantities in the German-speaking lands of the 19th century, specifically how they addressed the question of architectural style, posing the question 'In what...
Mar 31, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the first episode in our new series on Otto Wagner. In it we discussed 19th century Vienna, an ancient city wracked by extremes of urbanisation and population boom; political radicalism and revolution. A crumbling ancient order and an emerging modern metropolis came to create the Ringstrae, a vast redevelopment programme that took the empty space around the walls of the old city and filled it with vast marble institutions and speculatively built apartment complexes that came to symbolise...
Mar 18, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a preview of a bonus episode we published on Patreon as part of our series of WG Sebald's 'Austerlitz', subscribe to our Patreon to subscribe and get access to our back catalogue of bonus episodes. In this bonus episode we talked about the films of Patrick Keiller, specifically 'London' (1994) and 'Robinson in Space' (1997), a pair of meticulously observed polemical psycho-geographies, exploring the derangements and idiosyncrasies of Britain in the Long 90s. Like in the work of Sebald, a...
Mar 10, 2021•7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our second episode on WG Sebald's 2001 novel 'Austerlitz', encountering strangely preserved rooms, nightmarish dream landscapes, gigantesque 19th century fantasies, and a mix of psychoanalysis, Perrault's Bibliothque Nationale, Liverpool Street Station and Casanova. Watch Sebald giving a reading of Austerlitz and listen to an interview with him on KCRW . This episode is sponsored by Blue Crow Media , who gorgeous architectural maps. Use the offer code aboutbuildings at checkout to get 10% off. E...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our first episode of 2021 we discussed 'Austerlitz', the final novel by W.G. Sebald. It's the story, at the most basic level, of an architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz, who in middle age begins to rediscover his own submerged history. It's a novel driven by architectural spaces, which are mysterious containers of both individual and collective memory and history. Austeritz's own memories of his childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, his lost parents, and the bloody history of Eur...
Jan 31, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a preview from our latest Patreon Bonus Episode subscribe to our Patreon for just $3 a month to listen to the whole episode! Thank you to everyone who supported the show this year, we couldn't have done it without you, and we can't wait to discuss more architectural history in 2021. Our final episode for 2020 is here and our last episode on Jane Jacobs. We're discussing Robert Moses, the megalomaniacal titan of New York planning who wielded enormous political power and bent the metropoli...
Dec 28, 2020•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our second episode on Jane Jacobs' canonical work, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. In this second half we further discuss her vision for the ideal city, based on her experiences in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. We focus on her ideas around 'unslumming', her alternative model of gentle and community-led gentrification which offered an alternative to the mass-demolition of deprived neighbourhoods advocated by planners during this period. We talk about the ethics and politics of ge...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast The first episode in a two-part series on Jane Jacobs, a profoundly influential writer, thinker and campaigner on issues of urbanism, whose magnum opus 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' (1961) forms the backbone of our discussion. In it, Jacobs lays out an idealised vision of tight-knit, dense communities, inspired by her time living in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It is a vision of an interconnected, urban way of life dominated by local small-scale agents: families, independent bus...
Nov 25, 2020•Transcript available on Metacast The final episode in our series on the deep history of the monastery. Modernity has arrived and monasticism is living a strange afterlife. First, we discuss the early 19th century Utopian Socialism of Charles Fourier, whose Phalanstre take the framework of the monastery and repurpose it to build community whose purpose is not the Opus Dei , but to ensure that all its members live fulfilling and happy lives. Next come the Constructivist communities of the early Soviet Union, where monastic commun...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our second episode on Monasteries we're talking about Carthusians, millenarian religiosity, the co-option of radicalism by the mainstream, baroque splendour, Slow TV, retirement bungalows and whether Jesus owned the shirt on his back. In this episode we attempt to delve into the way that monastery buildings facilitate true Monastic obedience, and the way that different typologies of monastic domesticity might reflect different priorities in their orders. We also question how the Church harnes...
Sep 25, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this new 3 part series were trying something a little bit different, were going to try and think about the monastery from deep time up to the present day. The monastery is an almost unique architectural typology; in its continuity, the specificity of the brief and its legacy and afterlife. In this first episode we discuss the origins of the monastery, and the conflict that arises between differing visions of monastic life in 11-12th century France. What role should architecture, art, sculptur...
Aug 19, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our second episode on Christopher Alexander, we discuss 'A Pattern Language', the book he wrote with Murray Silverstein and Sara Ishikawa, published in 1977. The text proposes a list of patterns, derived from experience, imagination and vernacular traditions, from the scale of the city to the balcony and the flowerbed. The text has been influential on many professions, from architects to computer programmers, and its blend of universal claims, spatial analysis, political idiosyncrasy and desi...
Jul 10, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the first episode of a new series on Design Theorist, Architect, Mathematician and Computation Fan, Christopher Alexander. Alexander studied Mathematics at Cambridge University in the 1950s, then undertook the first ever PhD in Architecture at Harvard, where he applied newly emerging ideas of computational analysis to questions of design. The results of this combination are bizarre, often illogical, undeniably of there time, but also lay the foundations for much subsequent interaction be...
Jun 17, 2020•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this final episode on Zaha Hadid we discuss a small fraction of the huge number of projects that ZHA produced from the early noughties up to Zaha's untimely death in 2016. We attempt to reflect on Zaha's legacy as a designer, try to understand what concepts defined her design process, from Parametricism to pure sculptural form. There are so many projects from this period that we could have talked about, so we focus on discussing the most Projects discussed: Maxxi Museum in Rome, Ordrupgaard M...
May 17, 2020•2 hr 40 min•Transcript available on Metacast The third part of our ongoing series on Zaha Hadid! In this episode we discuss the early buildings of the practice, including IBA housing in Berlin, Vitra Fire Station, Spittelau Viaduct Housing, and the unbuilt competition winning design for the Cardiff Opera House. As always, make sure you check out our pinned instagram story to see pictures of all of the projects we discuss. Thanks for listening! Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every s...
May 03, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast UNLOCKED PATREON BONUS This unlocked bonus episode comes from our Patreon feed, where we post extra content and bonus discussions with every episode of the podcast. This bonus follows on from Episode 48, discussing the early projects of OMA and the theory of BIGNESS developed by Rem Koolhaas. If you want to access many hours of bonus material like this, you can subscribe to our Patreon for just $3 a month at www.patreon.com/about_buildings . Our series on Zaha Hadid will continue next week. Edit...
Apr 22, 2020•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our second episode on Zaha Hadid, we're covering the rest of the 1980s, from the competition to design the Peak Leisure Centre in Hong Kong, to the Deconstructivism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The episode also includes an interview with Andrew King, a principal at Lemay Architects in Canada, Professor at McGill University and winner of two AIA Progressive Architecture Awards. In the late 1980s Andrew worked in Zaha's office, and the interview gives a wonderful insight ...
Apr 14, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast In our first episode on Zaha Hadid, we dive into the spell-binding work of one of the most famous, controversial and interesting architects of her generation. We begin by imagining the unique atmosphere of the Architectural Association in the 1970s, where Zaha was a student, taught by Leon Krier, Rem Koolhaas and innumerable other architectural luminaries. We examine two of her student projects, Malevich's Tektonik and A Museum for the 19th Century, both heavily influenced by an interest in Russ...
Apr 08, 2020•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
