USModernist Radio - Architecture You Love

We love visiting great architecture and Modernist architecture does get visited – a lot – but nothing compares to the number of people who enjoy it through photography.  Especially this last year, when we've all been hunkered down awaiting vaccinations, we're reading and streaming visions of amazing homes, offices, and urban planning.  Join us today is Wayne Thom, a photographer famous for capturi...

Researching Modernist architecture hasn't always been easy, particularly before the internet, if anyone remembers back that far. Before our phones were full of Cardi B, Tik Tok, and $32 million inheritance offers, pending a $1200 processing fee, of course, researching Modernism meant spending time in real life deep in a major library. Fortunately, the web brings incredible research resources and t...

2020 was the fourth year USModernist Radio has been part of the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival, if by festival you mean online and by New York you mean anywhere on earth. Every fall, the authors, producers, experts, stars, and creators gather to premiere their latest architecture and design documentaries.  Today we talk with Rikke Selin Fokdal  and Kaspar Astrup Schröder, producers...

Everybody's got some niche they are into, right?  There are cat people, NASCAR people, golfing people, escape room people, and even after 55 years, Star Trek people. Today we welcome leaders in two special niches of Modernism, Beth Lennon, aka Mod Betty, of Retro Roadmap, and Howard and Gaby Morris of GreyScape, a London website dedicated to Brutalism, Modernism, and Constructivist design. Later o...

Whenever our friends the Classicists want to troll Modernism, they claim it's Communist-inspired and therefore no good. Since we have never known any building to determine economic policy, joining us are two people who dive deep into this "concrete" issue in the former Eastern Bloc: Haruna Honcoop, director of the film Built to Last: Relics of Communist Era Architecture, and Marie Kordovska, grand...

Harriet Pattison met renowned architect Louis Kahn in 1953 at Yale, but the real sparks flew years later in Philadelphia where she and Lou Kahn had a romantic relationship and a son, Nathaniel. It was, um, complicated. Pattison is an accomplished landscape architect, working in the Vermont office of the famous Dan Kiley and studied landscape architecture under Ian McHarg at the University of Penns...

It's one thing when neighbors don't like that butterfly mother in law shed in your backyard.  It's another when thousands of people in a city are without housing and neighborhoods don't want them anywhere close.  Over the decades, architecture has proclaimed the solution to this and other social problems can be solved through design, but as Dr. Phil might ask, "how'd that work out?"  Not so well,...

Well-known Modernist architects came to fame in a time before computers, a time where getting published in magazines was the mid-century equivalent of going viral.  Even if an architect lived in a large metro such as Los Angeles, world of mouth and house tours wouldn't get you the big commissions.  Blowing up meant having photos of your work in major publications of the era. To get those photos, y...

If you're a longtime listener, you know we have a special place in our hearts for Palm Springs, the mecca of Modernism, the home of the international film festival, the bedroom for concerts in Indio, and the cruising town that Sonny Bono cleaned up in the late 1980's before he ran for Governor.  It's our home away from home, but even Paris has reinvent itself from time to time.  Today's guests are...

This is the fourth year USModernist Radio has been part of the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival, if by festival you mean online and by New York you mean anywhere on earth.  Every fall, the authors, producers, experts, stars, and creators gather to premiere their latest architecture and design documentaries, and this year because of COVID Executive Director Kyle Bergman completely re-...

Architect Charles Dubois was famous for designing houses in California which earned the nickname Swiss Miss.  Designer Leonora Mahle takes us inside.  Later on, for something completely different, we'll visit with Lady Carnarvon, the owner of Downton Abbey, aka Highclere Castle.  Set on 5000 acres, it's the most famous house in Britain, except perhaps for an adorable little London starter home, by...

Like the Supremes, or Destiny's Child, today's guests have been rocking with the greatest hits of Modernist design for decades as the daughters or granddaughters of its most iconic architects and designers, Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Harry Bertoia.  Carla Hartman, Susan Saarinen, and Celia Bertoia are the best of friends and speak around the country as the Daughters of Design. 

Before Bjarke Ingels, before Tom Kundig, before Charlie Gwathmey, even before Richard Neutra, two brothers rocked the architecture scene in southern California in the early 1900's. Funded by the family behind Ivory Soap, Proctor and Gamble's first product, Charles and Henry Greene perfected the modern bungalow in Pasadena and influenced a giant in Modernist architecture, Harwell Hamilton Harris. ...

In 1959, the US had 48 states and a population of 177 million, Frank Sinatra won his first Grammy for Come Dance with Me, DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, which had been banned for decades, became OK to print, and a certain exciting and controversial architect died in his 90's.  Frank Lloyd Wright left an incredible legacy of innovative and beautiful buildings, one of which just changed hands...

In 1978, Australia decided to replace their old Congress, or Parliament House, in the capitol of Canberra. The competition drew 329 entries from 29 countries.  The winner was a Modernist design from the  Philadelphia firm of  Mitchell/Giurgola. Today we meet project  architect Hal Guida, plus Felicity Abbott, the production designer for Secret City, a Australian TV political thriller starring Anna...

Some Classicists are so passionate about Modernist architecture they create a well-financed, highly effective organization to point out the flaws of Modernist buildings and actively discourage new Modernist projects. Every Classicist we talk to mentions today's guest, Catesby Leigh, who has written about architecture for over 30 years . He co-founded the National Classical Art Society, headed by p...

Architect  Maria Ludwig Michael Mies changed his name.  He added his mother's maiden name Rohe and the Dutch "van der" to become, drum roll please, Mies van der Rohe. Most of his fans just refer to him as Mies – like Cher or Moby or Beyonce, he's still one of the most famous architects in the world some 50 years after his death.  Today we talk about his greatest house – the Farnsworth House – with...

In 1966 the first episode of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek   launched a franchise still going strong over fifty years later.  Sequels, movies, toys, fan films - there's just no end to Star Trek's bright, progressive, optimistic future where Earth has transcended national and international politics. Something architecture fans may have missed, and we certainly did, is that Star Trek adapted midcentu...

Ho Ho Ho, get out the Festivus Pole, it's our holiday show spectacular celebrating with returning guest co-host Erin Sterling Lewis.  If your world is Florida, Gene Leedy was one of the masters of Modernism in the 20th century, bursting on the scene as one of Architectural Record's most successful young architects of 1965.  With us is his daughter Saffie Leedy Ferris and architect Max Strang of Mi...

Mack Paul is a Raleigh real estate attorney who focuses on land use and public policy. He owns a sweet Modernist house designed by Brian Shawcroft, and he's an investor in several new Raleigh Modernist projects. Charlie Miller is a real estate broker in Charlotte who expanded to building exciting new Modernist houses – lots of them.  We'll also check in with Matt Bliss and Greg Kelly for unique Mo...

Victoria Ballard Bell's new book,  Triangle Modern Architecture , documents the rich history and unique cultural significance of the Triangle region in North Carolina, one of the most important on the national map of modern design. Over the last 75 years, the Modernist architecture in this area has grown to creatively combine innovation and technology with the area's history, culture, unique lands...

Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, LeCorbusier, and Marcel Breuer, architect Walter Gropius was one of the most influential Modernist architects of the 20th century. Gropius founded the heralded Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, but the rise of Hitler in the 1930's drove Gropius first to London working for Maxwell Fry, and later to Cambridge MA where he taught at Harvard and MIT. His post...

For your audible dining pleasure, today is a sumptuous Modernist buffet featuring Ralph Rapson, Elizabeth Schue Close, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Howe, and save room for dessert, a hazelnut Bjarke Ingels topped with marscapone. Yum! Jane King Hession is a Minneapolis-based architectural writer and historian specializing in midcentury modernism. With degrees in English and Art History and architectur...

If your world is Wichita, Kansas, the birthplace of Pizza Hut, White Castle and Kirstie Alley, there's no more controversial building right now than Century II, a performing arts space built by John Hickman, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, that's under siege from new development. Century II Performing Arts & Convention Center was built to commemorate Wichita's 1970 centennial. Designed by archite...

Architecture in America has been a white-dominated profession and that has been changing slowly. Very slowly. Guess what year the first Black woman got an architecture license in our fine state of North Carolina. 1950? 1970?  It was 1990. Today we welcome author and photographer Janna Ireland with a new book out on the most famous Black architect of the 20th century, Paul Williams , plus that pion...