USModernist Radio - Architecture You Love

This is the fifth year USModernist Radio has covered the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival, if by festival you mean mostly online and by New York you mean all over the world.  Every year, producers, experts, stars, and creators gather to premiere their latest architecture and design documentaries, and this past year with COVID subsiding, but still concerning, Executive Director Kyle B...

Architect Louis Kahn has been gone almost 50 years, but his legacy and influence only grows as architects the public alike cherish his enduring importance. His major works include the National Parliament in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas; and the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Kahn was also a rever...

Oh, how times have changed for the newspaper world. From 2008-2020, about two-thirds of newsroom jobs went away. Then the pandemic hit and more than 90 local papers shut down or were slashed in headcount. Even big papers like the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times are smaller and more focused, with digital and video media adding to but more often replacing coverage of...

Happy Holidays with George, Tom, Raleigh architect Erin Sterling Lewis, and author Elizabeth A. T. Smith, whose famous book on the Case Study Houses is an architecture heavyweight champion. The New York Times said "You need a California workout to lift it, but the book, an exhaustive homage to the houses, is worth the effort." Architecture critic J. P. Cohen said, "This book is a true gem, and con...

Columbus, Indiana is a city of just over 47,000, yet the national AIA ranks it 6th in the nation for architectural innovation and design – behind Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington DC.  Like Marfa, Texas is for artists, Columbus is a modernist architecture fan's heaven with an astonishing lineup of buildings by celebrated architects like Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier, I. M. Pe...

In 1950, a modest glass-walled Modernist house designed by Gregory Ain was on exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art's garden, another in the Museum's series of full scale builds of Modernist houses.  A system of movable walls made flexible spaces even though there were only two-bedrooms.  But once the exhibition closed, the entire house, and any knowledge of it, disappeared. Countless people over th...

Remember our show a while back on Seattle Modernism with Jim Olson of Olson Kundig?  Well before Jim Olson and Tom Kundig came along, the Pacific Northwest had architect Paul Hayden Kirk creating amazing Modernist houses.  Joining us today is Dale Kutzera, author Paul Hayden Kirk and the Rise of Northwest Modern.  Later on, travel in time back to 1961 and the Rat Pack with music from Deana Martin,...

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina is the largest planned research center in the United States, and it's getting bigger - much bigger, at least in terms of buildings.  During its first heyday in the 1960's, Research Triangle Park boasted several Modernist corporate campuses, most notably Paul Rudolph's complex of buildings for Burroughs Wellcome. Now under the leadership team of today's gues...

Architects like Chambers, Clark, Cody, Frey, Kaptur, Krisel, Wexler, and Williams put the Modernist architecture of Palm Springs on the map from the 1940's through the 2000's, and in Hugh Kaptur's case, still going at age 90.  Behind them are a new generation of Modernist architects and today we talk with one of the area's most successful, Sean Lockyer.  Later on, comedian and former architecture...

One of the great architects of midcentury Palm Springs was William F. Cody, featured in the Leo Zahn documentary Desert Maverick. Joining us is the author of a new book on Cody - his daughter, Cathy Cody, and later on, drummer Raice McLeod remembers the amazing singer Eva Cassidy and shares two of her songs.

When we hear about a Modernist house by an important architect being bought and destroyed, there's widespread outrage from preservationists. Why didn't these people try to save them?  Why didn't the buyers consult architectural historians?  The owners should be forced to do whatever it takes, and whatever it costs, to keep the houses intact, right?  It's a classic struggle between property rights...

Just when you thought it was another safe architecture chat, it's our Halloween midnight madness Mod-tacular, and joining us is someone who knows where all the bodies are buried, author Henry Kuehn of Architects Gravesites – along with modern preservationist by day, horror historian by night, Christine Madrid French. Later on, music from Peter Lamb and the Wolves, hopefully under a full moon.

This has been a tough time for travel, but in between COVID surges last summer, host George Smart managed to get to New York City for a series of conversations with architect Gisue Hariri, DOCOMOMO-US founder and architecture professor Theo Prudon, and prolific architecture journalist Fred Bernstein.  Later on, a few minutes with TikTok design critic Louisa Whitmore.

Connecticut is famous for the first hamburger (1895), Polaroid camera (1934), helicopter (1939), and color television (1948). It's the home of PEZ, World Wrestling, and Design Within Reach.  It's also a hotbed for Modernist houses by many famous architects such as Philip Johnson, John Johansen, Eliot Noyes, Edward Durell Stone, Gisue and Mojgan Hariri, Marcel Breuer, and even Frank Lloyd Wright. ...

The European Union has some of the same problems we do: damaging climate change, a flood of immigrants, and a population frequently in disagreement.  But while America argues vaccines and pounces on Hamilton's uber-inclusive Lin-Manuel Miranda for not being inclusive enough, the EU President Ursula von der Leyden created the New European Bauhaus High-Level Round Table.  Nice.  These valiant design...

The Stahl House in Los Angeles is among the most famous houses in the world. Designed by Pierre Koenig and engineered by William Porush, the Stahl House and its pool were immortalized by legendary design photographer Julius Shulman. In a conversation recorded poolside at the swanky Hotel Skylark in Palm Springs, where they were part of a panel discussion at the Palm Springs Museum of Art, our Geor...

Peter Bohlin and Peter Gluck are two of most innovative and successful architects in residential Modernist design.  In careers spanning over 14 decades, if we add them all together, their award-winning practices created several hundred award-winning houses you can see at usmodernist.org/gluck and usmodernist.org/bohlin.  Later on, commentary on the the famous Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe...

Like the Holy Grail or Colonel Sanders special 11 herbs and spices, people have been searching for the secret to successful prefabricated houses for nearly 100 years.  What could possibly be better than reasonably-priced, mostly factory built house parts assembled on your land in a matter of days or weeks, not months?  The promise of well-designed houses fast and cheap turns out, not so easy – or...

The bluest skies you've ever seen?  The hills the greenest green?  It's Seattle, Washington, backdrop for TV shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Frasier, and if you go back far enough, Here Come The Brides, the breakout series for 70's pop icons David Soul and Bobby Sherman.  In addition to having the most tech jobs in North America (sorry, San Jose) the Emerald city is also home to Starbucks and incred...

There's a lively city on the West Coast, a sprawling California metropolis that many consider the epicenter of Modernist architecture. Sorry, Bakersfield, it's not you, although you've got two good ones we know of. We're talking greater Los Angeles, 30,000 plus square miles from the valleys to the sea and across the mountains with thousands of Modernist houses from the 1920's through today.  Joini...

Marcel Breuer was one of several architects who brought European Modernism to the US. He was known for hundreds of projects including the Atlanta Public Library, The Whitney Museum in New York, the Pirelli Building in New Haven, The Housing and Urban Development Building in Washington DC, and many iconic houses in Massachusetts and Connecticut.  No one was more passionate than Breuer about his wor...

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, architect Albert Frey was the first American to work for  Le Corbusier , working on the famous Villa Savoye project among others. Le Corbusier helped Frey get a job with American architect A. Lawrence Kocher, also the managing editor of Architectural Record. After WWII, Frey moved to the resort community of Palm Springs and Frey become synonymous with desert modernism....

Many of our Modernist listeners are planning long-delayed holidays.  Oh where shall you go?  Roman ruins?  Cape Cod Villages?  Colonial Williamsburg?  We doubt it.  You're planning to hit the Modernist hotspots, and to help you we talk with Stefi Orazi, author of Modernist Escapes.  Later on, the leading edge of high school architecture education with returning guest Joan Gand - then music from Pa...

In Sarasota, Florida, one of the east coast's finest centers for Modernism, names like Paul Rudolph , Gene Leedy , Victor Lundy , Tim Siebert, and Jack West dominated the design scene from the 1940's through the 1980's.  Then came a new generation of architects that took things to a whole new level.  One of those, Guy Peterson , joins us from Sarasota.  Later on, returning musical guest Heather Ri...

What is a beautiful building?  What is an ugly building?  People have very different reactions looking at say Biltmore versus Fallingwater, and not just because they are vastly different sizes.  Joining us to discuss beauty in architecture is Don Ruggles, author of Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture and Producer of a new documentary, Built Beautiful.  Next, special USModernist correspondent Raymo...