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

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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

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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’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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We’re in Paris, 1917, where Charles-Edouard Jeanneret is making friends, thinking about sex (and writing enormous letters about it), designing the occasional mechanised abattoir / concrete garden terrace, going bankrupt, trying to sell concrete blocks to postwar society, inventing a new style of painting, launching a highly costly art magazine, and (finally!) acquiring the name under which he would become famous — Le Corbusier!

One of us had a very creaky chair in this episode. Also we were drinking again. Apologies for both.

We discussed — 

• The breeze block plant at Alfortville
• Societe d'Applications du Beton Arme
• a Slaughterhouse at Challuy, near Nevers

• (for no good reason) Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ (1906)
  - Unbuilt project for a dam

• a Water Tower in Podensac
  - his meeting and collaboration with Amedée Ozenfant
  - Purism as a style in Art — the Tate has a good definition
  - Fernand Léger
  - L’Esprit Nouveau

• Pierre Jeanneret

We’ve been reading — 

• Nicholas Fox Weber ‘Le Corbusier: A Life’ (2008)
• Jean-Louis Cohen ‘Le Corbusier: Le Grand’ (2014)
• Oppositions 15-16 (1980)
• Catherine de Smet ‘Le Corbusier: Architect of Books’ (2004)

Music —
Charles Trenet ‘Le Retour des Saisons’ archive.org
Victor Marching Bank ‘French Reel’ (1918) archive.org
Jean Sablon ‘Sur Les Quais de Vieux Paris’ (1941) archive.org
Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ (1940) archive.org

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We’re taking on the origin story of (for better or worse) the most important architect of the 20th century — Charles-Edouard Jeanneret aka Le Corbusier. His origins — petit bourgeois, Swiss, provincial — can make his eventual rise to world-enveloping notoriety and era-defining influence seem all the more unlikely. We’re digging into his childhood, family, education and travels as a young man before taking on a couple of early projects.

We discuss — 

• La Chaux de Fonds
• Charles L’Eplattanier, his teacher
• Jugendstil & Art Nouveau

Early projects — 

• Villa Fallet
• Villas Stotzer & Jacquemet
• Villa Jeanneret
• Villa Favre-Jacot

Travels, and meetings with — 

• Otto Wagner
• Josef Hoffmann
• Vienna Secession Building
• Auguste Perret
• Rue Franklin Apartments
• Peter Behrens
• Mount Athos

And a more detailed look at — 

• Villa Schwob (including Colin Rowe’s ‘Mannerism and Modern Architecture’)
• Maison Domino

We've been reading —

• Nicholas Fox Weber ‘Le Corbusier: A Life’ (2008)
• Jean-Louis Cohen ‘Le Corbusier: Le Grand’ (2014)
• Oppositions 15-16 (1980)

Music — 
The final part of Beethoven’s 9th — the Ode to Joy

An excerpt from — Mahler: Symphony No. 3: iii. Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast from archive.org

Britt Brothers — ‘Alpine Milkman Yodel’ (1933) from archive.org

Thanks for listening!

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First announced in 1931, the project for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow evolved into a staggeringly vast and bizarre proposal which stalled during WWII when only the foundations had been completed. A 400m tall neoclassical fantasy topped with a vast statue of Lenin; the Palace would probably, if completed, have still been the tallest building in the world in the year 2000. Forming a counterpart of sorts to our discussion of the Chicago Tribune — the Palace is another worldwide competition of the interwar period in which the battle over architectural style and ideology played out in the process of selection and development, as the old 1920s avant grade felt the ground shift under them and the ideology of Stalinist architecture began to solidify.

A couple of helpful listener corrections (here)[https://www.instagram.com/p/BbUxAq2FLaj/] (and here)[https://www.instagram.com/p/BbUxB0vlmnJ/]

We discussed — Joze Pleçnik Edwin Lutyens (neither in the competition)

Russian Avant-gardists — Ivan Leonidov Konstantin Melnikov Mosei Ginzburg

The League of Nations Competition entries of Le Corbusier & Hannes Meyer

Foreign modernists in Russia Ernst May

And the entries of — Le Corbusier Walter Gropius Erich Mendehlson Hans Pölzig Auguste Perret

The winners — Boris Iofan Vladimir Shchuko Hector Hamilton

Plus the later designs of — Ilya Golosov’s Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh Alabian, Kochar and Mordvinov’s Simbirtsev

Alexander Brodsky’s Reminiscences

Anatole Kopp ‘Foreign architects in the Soviet Union during the first two five-year plans’ Sonia Hoisington ‘Even Higher: The Evolution of the Palace of the Soviets’

Music — ‘A1’ from the album ‘ΝΕΑ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ ΚΟΚΚΑΛΑ’ by Kοκκαλα, from the Free Music Archive ‘Bolshevik Leaves Home’ (1918) by D. Vasilev-Buglay, Demyan Bedniy Soviet National Anthem, Stalin version

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