We now have a Patreon — you can subscribe to get additional content for every episode.

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanerret's 'Five Points' (1926) were an attempt to condense the fundamental structural and design principles underlying their new architecture. Drawing on the discoveries made during design and construction of their early villa projects, the points are in a sense the culmination and fulfillment of the original 'Maison Domino' idea of 1914.

The points set the template for the most famous 'Purist' villas of the later 1920s, culminating in the Villas Stein-La Monzie and Savoye, icons of what became the 'International Style.'

This episode started off as a single chat but there was too much so we've split it.

We discuss — — Villa Church (need photos of spaces)
— Pierre Chenal's film 'L'architecture d'aujourd'hui'
— Five points towards a new architecture
— Villa Meyer
— Villa Ocampo
— Ramps
— Villa Cook

Music — 'Modern Design' Johnny Messner And His Orchestra from archive.org

Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show.

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

We’re launching a Patreon — you can subscribe to get additional content for every episode.

Bernard Rudofsky’s exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964 — and the fantastically successful book which followed it, have become an iconic polemic in support of the architectural ‘vernacular’. Ever-keen to play up his own iconoclastic distance from mainstream of architectural thought, Rudofsky would later claim that the idea was, at the time he proposed it, ‘simply not respectable.’ In hindsight though, the exhibition actually fits very clearly within a broader ‘return’ to an image of architecture’s pre-industrial roots among the postwar avant gardes all over the world.

Architecture Without Architects definition of vernacular architecture is (typically) idiosyncratic. It contains more or less everything outside the canon of architectural history, and free from entanglement in industrial supply chains. There are 3000-year-old rock dwellings, bamboo houses under construction. The images in the catalogue are carefully paired — the hollowed-out tufa pinnacles of Göreme in Turkey above a village of Apulian trulli — each one an ingenious conical pile of stones around a pitched circular chamber — mountains above and below. But what matters is that these houses, towns, and structures, the anonymous creations of these isolated and anonymous designers are presented, in the clarifying light of black and white photography, as a window into a world outside the prison of modernity — organic, communally unified and bizarrely and daringly creative.

We’re talking about Architecture Without Architects within the context of Rudofsky’s polymathic, crankish, sarcastic and wholly inimitable vision and career.

Music — Eddie Dunstedter — ‘Dancing Tambourine (Pandereta)’ Dick McDonough and his Orchestra — ‘My Cabin of Dreams’ from archive.org Athenian Mandolin Quartet — ‘Cacliz March’ Chris Zabriskie — ‘The Dark Glow of Mountains’ From the Free Music Archive

Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show.

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Jacques Tati's 'Mon Oncle' (1957) and 'Playtime' (1967) playfully dramatise the clash between old and new in the fast-changing cities of post-war France. Nostalgia, alienation, the absurdity of modern life and work, play, rhythm, rebellion and the curious affordances of materials and everyday items... serious fun, with silly noises.

Hope you're all enjoying the summer weather and speak soon!

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Adolf Loos’s essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1910) is considered the classic modernist polemic against the frills and folderols of the established arts of the day.

We're in the city of Freud — and the neurotic subtext is very close to the surface.

We discuss a little of Loos’s career as an architectural iconoclast, jersey fanatic, and pervert :-/

Then we go on to a more freeform discussion of ornament in the contemporary, during which we massively contradict ourselves several times.

We discussed — 

• Freud Nietzsche Hegel Darwin
• Louis Sullivan
• Mrs Beeton
• English Free Building — Hermann Muthesius
• Peter Behrens
• Karl Friedrich Schinkel
• Joseph Maria Olbrich
• Henry van der Velde
• Joseph Hoffmann
• Josephine Baker’s 'Banana Dance'
• The black granite bathroom at Villa Karma
• (On the subject of reprehensible characters) Albert Speer

Contemporary ornamenters — 

• Caruso St John
• Farshid Moussavi & her book on facades

Music — 

• Victor Sylvester and his Ballroom Orchestra ‘Vienna, City of my Dreams’
• The Three Suns ‘Alt Wien’ (1949)
• Philharmonic Orchestra Berlin ‘Von Wien durch die Welt'
• Oldbrig's zither trio ‘Wien bliebt Wien’
  All from archive.org

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In this episode we explore in two early schemes for mass housing, at Pessac and in Stuttgart.

Among many other things, we talked about —

• Bourneville
• New Lanark
  - Arnold circus
  - Bruno taut’s horseshoe estate
  - Pessac
  - Henri Frugès
  - The Weissenhofseidlung
  - Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky
  - Hannes Meyer’s essay ‘The New World’

Music & Interlude —

• Harry Ross ‘Get Me an Apartment - Part 1’ from archive.org

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

The concluding part of our discussion of ‘Urbanism’ (1925) — we look at the proposals for a Contemporary City for Three Million (1923), and the notorious Plan Voisin (1925). For Le Corbusier’s detractors, these are really the crimes of the century. We did our best to think of something nice to say about them.

Music —
Dave Gabriel ‘Midst of their morning chimes’
Oneohtrix Point Never ‘Nobody Here’

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

The first of a two part episode exploring Le Corbusier’s infamous and much-derided urban proposals, exhibited in the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion in 1925. In this part, we’re conducting a close reading of ‘Urbanism’ (sometimes known as ‘The City of Tomorrow and its Planning’).

We mostly stayed on topic but there are allusions to

• Camillo Sitte
• Augustus Welby Pugin’s ‘Comparisons’

Music —

• Glass Boy ‘WELP’
• Lovira ‘All Things Considered’
• Loyalty Freak Music ‘Once More With You’ and ‘Waiting TTTT’
• Three Chain Links ‘Heavy Traffic’
• All from the Free Music Archive

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Franz Kafka’s first, and least-finished, novel is an imaginary journey around the USA (a country he never visited). Written in 1912, it’s a fantasy of America at a time when seemed, to Europeans at least, to be the most futuristic (and mysterious) place on Earth.

Kafka’s fascination with machinery, technology and engineering is on display in ‘Amerika’, in which the young Karl Rossmann finds himself cut adrift in a land of glass elevators, miles-long traffic jams, endless hotels, filled with delirious extremes of luxury, poverty and inventiveness.

The edition we read is the current Penguin translation by Michael Hoffman.

We made brief reference to Joseph Roth, and to Neuromancer’s ‘Villa Straylight’.

Thanks for listening and Happy New Year!

Music:

• David Rose and his Orchestra / Anton Dvorak ‘Humoresque’ (1946) archive.org
• Felix Arndt / Anton Dvorak ‘Humoresque’ (1917) at archive.org
• Dvorak, Casals, Szell, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra ‘Cello Concerto’ I / II (1937) archive.org
• Dvorak, Szell, Cleveland Orchestra ’Slavonic Dances’ 2, 4 & 5 (1947) archive.org
• Efrem Zimbalist; Sam Chotzinoff; Zimbalist ‘Hebrew Melody and Dance’ (1912) archive.org
• Riccardo Martin; Dvorak; Victor Orchestra ‘Als die alte Mutter’ (1910) archive.org
• Ukrainska Orchestra Pawla Humeniuka ‘Kozak-Trepak’ from the Free Music Archive
• Jack Perry & the Light Crust Doughboys ‘Oklahoma Waltz’ (1947) youtube

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

For our Christmas episode, we're discussing the early Purist villas!

Knowing the right people, and a relentless programme of self-publicity yielded a steady stream of clients for Le Corbusier in the early 1920s, and allowed him to explore an architectural complement to Purism, most notably in a pair of houses for art-loving ‘batchelors’ — the Ozenfant Studio and Villa La Roche. We found time to discuss (probably with unwarranted levity, sorry) the death of Le Corbusier’s father George, and his troubled marriage to Yvonne Gallis.

Topics include — - Maison Citrohan
- Villa Ker-ka-re
- Studio Ozenfant

• Villa La Roche
  - Allusions to the English House and Pliny episodes 01 & 05, and 02 Strawberry Hill (Horace Walpole)

• The Architectural promenade
  - The Hôtel Particulier
  - CN Ledoux
  - Ryue Nishizawa & SANAA
  - Domesticity, Layered Space and the ‘Buffer Zone’

• Villa Le Lac in Corseaux
  - The 'involuntary euthanasia' of his father George
  - Luigi Snozzi

• Yvonne Gallis

Music —

• Emile Petti and his cosmopolitans — Cocktail Hour at the Savoy Plaza
• Joseph C Smith’s Orchestra ‘Oh, Frenchy!’
• Charles Trenet ‘En ecoutant mon cour chanter’
• Jean Sablon ‘J’attendrai’ all from archive.org

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

A new epoch has begun! Le Corbusier’s ‘discovery’ is that the style of future architecture is to be found new inventions of the machine age — planes, cars, ocean liners. But ‘Towards a New Architecture’ is, at its heart, an argument for a fusion of timeless values and contemporary technology — provocatively encapsulated in its juxtaposition of a sports car and the Parthenon.

We went through the book in order, focussing on the chapters:

• The Engineer’s Aesthetic

• Three Reminders to Architects
  - Regulating Lines

• Eyes Which Do Not See

• The Pure Creation of the Mind
• Architecture or Revolution

Mentioning along the way: LC’s early books

• ‘Etude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en Allemagne’, ‘Apres Le Cubisme’, ‘L’Art decoratif d’aujourdhui’, ‘La peinture moderne’
• Adolf Loos
• Piranesi’s ‘Campo Marzo’
• The Ecole des Beaux Arts
• Poché as a heuristic
• Christopher Alexander’s ‘A Pattern Language’
• Rob Krier ‘Architectural Design’
• Greek temples in Athens and Paestum
• Michelangelo
• Patrick Schumacher’s ’Autopoiesis of Architecture’
• at the end I sort of talked rather half-heartedly about Full Luxury Communism

Music is by Lee Rosevere
From the albums ‘Music for Podcasts’ and ‘Music for Podcasts 2’ ‘Musical Mathematics’, ‘Biking in the park’, ‘Featherlight’, ‘Places Unseen’

The outdo is by Mde. Ed. Bolduc ‘J’ai un bouton sur la langue’ archive.org

Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook

We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.