Rem Koolhaas and the firm he founded with three partners in 1975 — Office of Metropolitan Architects, OMA — are fascinating, critical and provocative presence within the architectural culture of the 1970s and 1980s, riding the wave of the crisis of modernist collapse while positioning themselves outside or against all of the main tendencies in the post-modern.

In this episode we’re focussing on a particular, transitional moment, in which the early ‘paper’ projects start to be replaced by real buildings and large scale competition entries, culminating in three fascinating competition entries from 1989 — the Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and Très Grand Bibliothèque (TBG).

Lee Rosevere ‘Baldachin’ from the album ‘Music for Podcasts 3’ on the Free Music Archive

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

We continue our discussion of the theoretical works of Robert Venturi with this episode on ‘Learning from Las Vegas — The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form’ — researched and written with Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour, and published in 1972.

The book, which examines the architecture of the Vegas strip, is the origin of the famous ‘Duck vs Decorated Shed’ comparison, and contains a lot else besides, including denunciations of the cult of Space, praise for the ‘ugly and ordinary,’ a certain amount of ostentatiously-wielded erudition, and so on.

Music: Al Smith 'Road House' https://archive.org/details/78_road-house_al-smith-a-smith-c-carter_gbia0054635a

This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus — a streaming learning service with video lectures by experts in all sorts of fields. Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com/BUILDINGS to get a month of free access to thousands of courses.

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

For the first AB+C of 2019 we’re tackling one of the seminal texts of the 1960s, and an iconic moment in the stylistic overthrow of the postwar modernist order — Robert Venturi’s ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’ (1966). It’s a slim, lavishly illustrated volume, which seems lucid and straightforward, but upon closer reading turns out to be much more elusive. What are complexity and contradiction, where are they found, and what are architects supposed to do with them?

On the bonus we’ll be discussing the early projects of Venturi and Rauch.

This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus — a streaming learning service with video lectures by experts in all sorts of fields. Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com/BUILDINGS to get a month of free access to thousands of courses.

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

We're a bit late with the first episode of the new year, so I'm releasing our bonus conversation on Italian fascist architecture to tide you over until then. If you want more material like this, there's a link to the Patreon below.

We talk about the architecture of the Italian fascist period. Some of it is pretty good, unfortunately. Some of it is very weird indeed.

We cover a lot ground, including — Gino Coppedè, Giovanni Muzio, Antoni Sant’Elia, Mario Chiattone, Giuseppe Terragni , Fortunato Depero, Marcello Piacentini, Armando Brasini and more.

Music is Ottorino Respighi — Serenata per piccola orchestra

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

We finally get onto the last book of Stones of Venice, and its reverberations through the long second half of the 19th century. Young Ruskinians, EL Godwin, William Burges, William Morris and so on.

Music — Vivaldi concerto for two horns, strings and continuo in F major RV 539 pt I The Fall — Living too late

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Giovanni Michelucci was born in 1891, and lived through nine-tenths of the 20th century, through all its terrifying and perplexing twists and dislocations. Throughout his career, his work manages to express an idiosyncratic and critical relationship to the spirit of the age. Over fifty at the end of the war, and sacked from his university job in the late 1950s for being too old, he would go on to produce his best and most daring work in the 60s and 70s.

We discuss Michelucci and Italy, fascism, post-war, and late style.

Apologies for the quality of Luke’s audio —

On the bonus, we take a longer look at the ideological tensions within Mussolini-era architecture, Giovanni Muzio, Giuseppe Terragni, and many others.

Music —
Rossini ‘Le Cenerentola’ Blackway — New Life

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

A collaboration between About Buildings + Cities and Stories from the Eastern West (@sftewpodcast) — a cool podcast telling little-known stories from Central & Eastern Europe.

We discuss Tomas Bata's modernist shoe-factory Utopia in Zlin, Moravia, his project to create an orderly (and suitably hierarchical) paradise for loyal, productive, clean-living workers, and the spread of his model all over Europe — even as far as Essex!

Thanks a lot to Wojciech and Adam for coming to interview us.

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

This is the audio from our ‘In Conversation’ with Adam Caruso, held at Nottingham Contemporary on October the 4th.

You can (and probably should, if you want to know what’s going on) download the slides from the presentation here — https://tinyurl.com/y7gab672

We didn’t get through the whole slideshow, but we’ll talk about what we missed on the second part.

Thanks a lot to Sam, Mercè et al at Nottingham Contemporary…!

And to you, listener, for listening.

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

This is the audio from our ‘In Conversation’ with Adam Caruso, held at Nottingham Contemporary on October the 4th.

You can (and probably should, if you want to know what’s going on) download the slides from the presentation here — https://tinyurl.com/y7gab672

We didn’t get through the whole slideshow, but we’ll talk about what we missed on the second part.

Thanks a lot to Sam, Mercè et al at Nottingham Contemporary…!

And to you, listener, for listening.

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

We discuss the first two volumes of 'Stones of Venice' — the interminable first and dream-like second. Shafts, archivolts, more shafts, rotten and sun-whitened vegetation, encrustation, palaces (Gothic and Byzantine), melancholy ruins, the sound of distant seabirds, and lapis luzuli and gold aplenty.

Thanks for listening — we're gearing up for a productive autumn I hope.

Audio includes — the following site recordings from the Radio Aporee project on archive.org ‘Zadar, Sea Organ - Sea Organ’ by Doro-Koeln (link)[https://archive.org/details/aporee_8070_23343] ‘In a plane before the flight, 31700 Blagnac, France - Before the flight !’ by claire_sauvaget (link)[https://archive.org/details/aporee_34599_39770] ‘in the airplane - approaching tokio airport’ by Frank Schulte (link)[https://archive.org/details/aporee_7538_9283] ’cargo train terminal, Ljubljana - train arrives and stops’ by udo noll (link)[https://archive.org/details/aporee_15347_17883] ’West Wittering, UK - ships foghorn ... brent geese …’ by david m (link)[https://archive.org/details/aporee_34620_39791]

Plus music — Chris Zabriskie ‘Cylinder Nine’ from the album ‘Cylinders’ on the (Free Music Archive)[freemusicarchive.org] Waves of the sea — Royal Servian Tamburiza from (archive.org)[https://archive.org/details/78_waves-of-the-sea_royal-servian-tamburitza-orch-savski-volovi_gbia0018162b]

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 find us!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.