USModernist Radio - Architecture You Love

More fun Modernist places most people don't know - explored from conversations at Modernism Week 2023  between George Smart, Tom Guild, and:  Simcha Schtull on the Elvis Honeymoon House, Melissa Riche and Dan Allen on Rancho Mirage, Dana Al-Marashi and TK Harvey on the United Arab Emirages; and the famous Isokon building in the UK with Magnus England and Leila DayBelge.

We're thrilled to talk with two of America's foremost architecture critics, recorded in New York City. Alexandra Lange is an award-winning architectural critic for Curbed.com and the author of several books on architecture and America's built environment. A graduate of NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and a former Loeb Fellow in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, her most recent book is...

Today's show, recorded at Modernism Week 2023, is places.  With some great guests, we will explore Southridge in Palm Springs with architect Susan Secoy Jensen; Marfa, Texas with Dean Upe Peter Flueckiger; and the Rocky Mountains with author John Gendall. After that, music with returning podcast guest Laura Windley and her Mint Julep Jazz Band.

USModernist Radio started in 2015, one dark and stormy afternoon, and we celebrate episode 300 with a special guest architect. Devoted listeners know exactly who we're talking about, because in past shows, every time we say his name you hear a sound.  Today we welcome one of the most successful architects in the world, Bjarke Ingels of BIG. Later, we swoon over jazz vocalist Halie Loren.

Starting in the late 50's, the Hamptons was largely farmland, and people built small, intricate Modernist houses to get away from city life.  Today, with a new wave of huge houses and immense wealth controlling real estate, preservationists are focusing on both creating new modest Modernist houses and saving midcentury Modernist houses from the bulldozer.  David Sokol is the former managing editor...

Architect John Patrick Winberry is the founding principal of the Queens-based UP Studio, recently longlisted for Dezeen's architecture studio of the year award, and one of the firm's latest projects is featured on CBS's America: By Design. Later on, we meet a dynamic duo of moms and longtime friends who started flipping Modernist houses and repairing others for clients wanting to sell.  Hairpin Ho...

We've got a full roster of guests from Modernism Week 2023 in Palm Springs. Speaking on famous midcentury architects and designers, you'll hear from Jacques Caussin on Raymond Loewy, Lila Cohen on Herb Greene, Alan Hess on Googie architecture, and Michelangelo Sabatino and Maristella Casciato on Carlo Mollino.

Today, our world is New York City, where you'll hear conversations between George and former editor-in-chief of Architectural Record Cathleen McGuigan, architecture photographer and documentary filmmaker Bilyana Dimitrova, architect Adam Beaulieu of COOKFOX, and Common Edge editor Martin Pedersen.

Nowhere in the world celebrates Modernism better than Modernism Week in Palm Springs, California. Every February, they have a weeklong architecture and design festival, which actually lasts 11 days,  and USModernist Radio was there interviewing keynote speakers plus special guests at the USModernist compound, aka poolside at the hip Hotel Skylark. Our 2023 coverage kicks off with architecture crit...

You just can't underestimate the satisfaction of a great office chair.  We spend most of our waking lives at work, often sitting, so comfort is important.  And for many, the location of work has changed.  Accelerated by the pandemic, your workplace is as likely to be a kitchen or den as it is a floor of offices. The KNOLL company had some of the most celebrated chairs in the world including Eero S...

The Architecture and Design Film Festival, or ADFF, brings the stars, producers, and creators to premiere their latest documentaries. ADFF Executive Director Kyle Bergman curates visually wonderful, thought-provoking, and faithfully documented films that capture the brilliance of architects, artists, and significant buildings around the world.  Bergman started the series in New York and now it's i...

G. E. Kidder Smith was a trained architect, an architectural historian, and an architectural A prolific scholar, teacher, and author, he is the subject of a new book by Angelo Maggi.  Joining us today from Switzerland is Kidder's son, internationally acclaimed lutist, or is it lutenist, Hoppy Smith, and from Chicago architectural historian and author Michelangelo Sabatino, who wrote the forward to...

One Weekend - Two John Lautner Houses! The Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer Cocktail Party at the Harvey House, Saturday, April 22, 5-8pm.  Explore one of the most envied houses in America! You'll share a beautiful evening overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory, and the Hollywood sign through astonishing views. You'll enjoy delicious appetizers plus signature cocktails provided by...

Los Angeles is the epicenter of Modernist houses.  There are so many in the TMZ that it would take years to see even half of them. Because of sheer numbers, LA is also the epicenter for serial Modernists – those who have owned more than one Modernist house.  And we owe that group huge thanks, because they are the people investing huge amounts, often more than they probably should, to preserve icon...

We're going all over the place today, from Bentonville Arkansas to New York City to Indianapolis Indiana with guests Dylan Turk of the Crystal Bridges Museum, Kate Scott of NABR, a development firm doing interesting things with Bjarke Ingels, and Vess Ruchtenberg, grandson of Jan Ruhtenberg, one of the most influential architects and designers you've never heard of. 

As New Yorkers grew more prosperous in the 1960's, they wanted to escape to the Hamptons of Long Island, a place at the time of mostly farmland – and where summer is a verb.  After working briefly for Philip Johnson, architect Norman Jaffe set up his own practice and within a few years everybody who was anybody in New York society wanted a Jaffe house.  Known for meticulous design and detail, and...

Returning guest Frances Anderton has been telling stories and distilling ideas about design, architecture, and the cityscape of Los Angeles in print and broadcast media and at public events since 1991. Born and raised in Bath, England, Frances earned a degree in architecture at the University College of London. After serving as associate editor at Architecture Review, during which she was exposed...

It's our Valentine's Day show, and what could be better than being in love?  Oh man, your brain is on a euphoric, crazy, often stupid, out of your mind focus on someone or some building that lights you up.  You can't stop checking messages, you can't stop googling.  Your heart is racing, and your body is a circus of feel-good chemicals.  Dopamine revs you up, and serotonin falls, taking your ratio...

Topeka Kansas is the home of the famous Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education that ruled against segregation, it's where Annette Bening and Katrina of Katrina and the Waves grew up.  It's where Wil Wheaton of Star Trek used to party with Penn Gillette.   It's where Dr. Phil started … a health club…. with his dad in 1971, well before being discovered by Oprah when the beef industry sued h...

Architecture is a tough field, one of the most demanding in terms of academic work.  Once you graduate, a Masters Degree in something else is usually needed.  Then entry level pay is seldom great, and everyone, we mean everyone – is a critic.  Back in the 20th century, when Modernism had it's heyday, the small number of black architects had it even harder, yet - they quietly created homes and buil...

Los Angeles architect Ray Kappe went on his own in 1954, completing dozens of Modernist houses and teaching. After serving as Founding Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, Kappe resigned in 1972 and started the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC) which is the Hogwarts of architecture, turned out several thousand graduates, and is considered one of the...

If your Mom or Dad is an architect, architecture gets into your DNA whether you like it or not, and one day, it's gonna come out.  For one amazing renaissance woman, an artist, writer, investment banker, film producer, tattoo artist agent, and economic development consultant, she had to go all the way to Iowa to buy her dream house - by Frank Lloyd Wright - and now she owns it, at least legally. ...

Joining us today is Los Angeles architect Steven Ehrlich of Ehrlich Yahai Rhee Chaney.  Just like we preserve Wright and Neutra and Schindler and Lautner now, in the future we'll be working to save Modernist houses by this 40-person firm, honored with over 150 awards including the AIA National Firm Award and 9 national AIA design awards. Later on in the show, music with Dutch jazz vocalist Laura F...

Kicking off things for 2023 is Lee Bey, Chicago architecture critic,  photographer for the new book W ho Is the City For? with Blair Kamin, and the author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago's South Side .  Later on, we turn up the heat with grillmaster Greg Sages, also the Executive Director of The Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. 

Since the 1950's, the US Government has hired Modernist architects like Edward Durell Stone, John Johansen, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, and more recently Kieran Timberlake to design US Embassies all over the world.  Modernism most clearly expresses the idea of freedom and these buildings are a showcase for America.  But as Dr. Phil might say, "how's that working for us?" Joining...