USModernist Radio - Architecture You Love

Colin Flavin, founder of Flavin Architects, has been building modern houses in New England for more than 30 years. An avid sketch artist and an MIT grad, Colin spoke at Modernism Week on East Coast modernist residential architecture and its impact on community design.  Author and artist Justin Beal went to Yale and USC and his art is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Museu...

Going back as far as Neutra and Schindler, it has always been hard as an architect to specialize in houses - and even harder to specialize in Modernist houses. Clients, even the most forward-thinking, collaborative, affluent clients, are time-consuming - when for the same amount of time you could design a 120,000 square foot office building for a much bigger fee. So those architects who are prolif...

Architect Eddie Jones is founder of Jones Studio, based in Phoenix AZ.  He began practice in 1979, starting out with a T-square, some pencils, and a desk in his Ralph Haver-designed house.  His book, Jones Studio House: Sensual Modernism, looks back on Eddie's quiet yet influential forty-year career through photos and personal stories. Award-winning landscape architect Signe Nielsen designed the a...

Eero Saarinen, who died in 1961, is now one of the most well-known and respected Modernist architects in history, famous for the St. Louis Arch, the TWA Terminal at JFK, Dulles Airport, and many other innovative projects. More that about any other architect, his work signaled an optimistic future, a sweeping beautiful, curvy future that was going to require, as the song would say decades later, sh...

Today we travel to three sunny destinations featured at this year's Modernism Week lectures: Florida, Cuba, and San Diego. The New York Times calls Charles Phoenix "the King of Retro" for his spirited and hilarious slide shows celebrating the midcentury American lifestyle. He started collecting vintage Kodachrome slides in the 1990s and has been giving talks and creating colorful coffee table book...

Earlier this year, our friends the Classicists gathered to discuss traditional and classical architecture. As the day unfolded, Modernism was predictably and continually pounded as the cause of all kinds of awful consequences on humanity. In football the referee would blow the whistle at this point for piling on. Then one lone voice of reason stood up. Today we welcome Melissa Delvecchio of Robert...

Like so many people, Erik Rosenow moved to Palm Springs for his love of midcentury architecture. He bought a 1959 Donald Wexler-designed house in El Rancho Vista Estates, founded a neighborhood community organization, and became President of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, where he's still on the Board. He now lives in a 1970s brutalist townhome attributed to William Cody. Erik is the au...

Today we're talking about Phoenix, Arizona, home of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, Modernist architect Al Beadle, and the world's worst-named golf tournament, the Waste Management Open. Joining us is Phoenix architect John Anderson of 180 Degrees and legendary founder of Modern Phoenix.net, historian and preservationst Alison King.

Modernism Week in Palm Springs is a world-famous event but once you're there you can see how important it is to local people, economy, and preservation movement.  Modernism Week began in 2006 as an offshoot of the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale, which continues, and the annual Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture & Design Council Symposium, which did not.  In February 2020, right before COVID,...

It's not easy getting people to admit something is a problem, then getting agreement on a solution, then finding the political will and money to get anything implemented. Architectural scholars offer intricate and complex design analysis for even larger and more complex social problems. Design scholars have their own rhythmic and intense way of writing as they search to provide meaningful analysis...

Ron Hinklin is the most famous voice you've never heard of. A successful singer since his junior high school days, Ron led the group responsible for some of the most iconic sounds of the 1970s, including vocals on the Partridge Family hit "I Think I Love You," for which Ron and his group nabbed a Grammy nomination. He also sang some of TV's most memorable theme songs like MASH, That Girl, Batman,...

Michelangelo Sabatino is a professor in the IIT College of Architecture. He has trained as an architect, preservationist, and architecture-art-design historian and has served on a number of not-for-profit organization boards ranging from the Society of Architectural Historians to Docomomo International. His books include Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone and his...

The development of four-lane highways and interstates in the 1950's and 1960's created a huge surge in car travel.  In a time before the minivan, families would pile in the station wagon or the Airstream and hit the road to discover America.  Roadside motels sprung up everywhere and car culture exploded.  Sports cars like the wildly famous Mustang defined cool, and what better than to drive around...

Design critic Inga Saffron is the Philadelphia Inquirer 's most feared columnist. Raised in Levittown NY she always wanted to be a newspaper reporter - and her first beat was the Girl Scout newspaper.  She attended New York University, studied in France, and settled in Dublin, Ireland writing Irish publications and Newsweek. Joining the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1984, from 1994-1998, she was their...

Every strong passion has … a gift shop ... with art capturing the enthusiast's lifestyle.  If you're into Star Wars or golf or architecture, the world's artists have plenty of wonderful paintings and prints to illuminate your walls.  Today we talk from Modernism Week 2022 with two artists, Josh Agle (aka Shag) and Carrie Graber, whose works hang in hundreds if not thousands of Modernist houses and...

One of the most well-known New York design educators, Daniella Ohad of Daniella on Design was former sergeant in the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. She graduated from Tel Aviv University and moved to New York for a Masters from FIT and a PhD from Bard.  Now she's an influencer, historian, writer, talk show host, curator, and keynote speaker. She's committed to design education and has...

In our 5th show from Modernism Week 2022, George and Tom talk with owners of significant Modernist houses, plus one very lucky houseguest:  Ronnie Sassoon who's owned houses by Hal Levitt, Richard Neutra, and Breuer; Alfonso Cordon and Cord Struckmann of Beverly Thorne's Case Study House 26; and coming into town from LA just for this interview, the man, the myth, the legend, the Kato Kaelin of his...

Here's the story…of a lovely lady….who hired a world-famous architect to design a small but spectacular house in Plano, Illinois, along the Fox River.  Things didn't work out so well, and unfortunately Dr. Edith Farnsworth's story has been told largely from the perspective of that world-famous architect.  Joining us today to share Edith's story, and what happened to the house, are professors Nora...

What could be more fun than Modernist dogs, tiki culture, and mid-century modern motels?  George and Tom talk with the author of Palm Springs Modern Dogs at Home, Nancy Baron, motels with Heather David, author of Motel California, and dive into Tiki culture with Sven Kirsten, author of the Book of Tiki.  Later on, reading from his latest novel, Death by Design at Alcatraz,  Anthony Poon.

Auric Goldfinger was one of most memorable evil villains in the James Bond 007 series.  Played by Gert Frobe in the 1964 movie named for him, Goldfinger,  this criminal mastermind created a scheme to corner the gold market by exploding a radioactive bomb over Fort Knox, the US gold supply housed in Kentucky.  That was back when the nation's debt was a mere $311 billion and was backed by this gold,...

In our 3rd show from Modernism Week 2022, we chat with award-winning architects Angie Brooks and Larry Scarpa; learn from Bruce Becker about the newly renovated Hotel Marcel in New Haven CT, formerly the Pirelli building designed by Marcel Breuer, and formerly a billboard for IKEA!  Later on, reading from his latest novel, Death by Design at Alcatraz,  Anthony Poon. 

Some architects in the early days of Modernism designed their own furniture, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra.  Today, with a few exceptions, Modernist architects stay out of the furniture biz and rely on talented people like today's guest, legendary furniture designer Dakota Jackson.  Later on, a little slow dancing with musical guest Krisanthi Pappas.

In our 2nd show from Modernism Week 2022, we explore Modernism in Monterey CA with returning guest Pierluigi Serraino, Modernism in Bakersfield CA with Neutra owner David Coffey, and listen to a reading from his latest novel, Death by Design at Alcatraz, from Anthony Poon. 

Few architects have been as exciting or controversial as Paul Rudolph, whose early successes designing Modernist vacation homes in Sarasota FL led to a later career as Chair of the Architecture Department at Yale, then nearly 30 years designing buildings with intense use of concrete and steel. While the public was largely inspired by his work, Rudolph fell out of favor in the US and shifted to Sin...

Every year USModernist Radio goes to Palm Springs for Modernism Week, the Super Bowl of mid-century modernism.  This is no weekend tabletop show at the Elks lodge. It takes a huge village, a rather attractive Modernist village with perfect weather, to create an event that sells over 120,000 tickets across 11 days in February.  Nowhere in the world celebrates Modernism better. This was the sixth ye...