About Buildings + Cities

Andrea Palladio's Quattro Libri is one of the most influential and important architectural books ever published. We discuss the four books of architecture, covering everything from masonry constructi…

Some of Andrea Palladio's most powerful and enduring work was carried out for his home city of Vicenza. We discuss some of his civic projects, and his extraordinary unrealised design for the Rialto B…

Though less wholly innovative than his villas, Andrea Palladio's palazzi for the nobility of Vicenza are still full of fascinating ideas, from the treatment of the facade, to the handling of difficul…

Andrea Palladio created a new style of classical domestic architecture in his villa designs in the 1540-60s. We talk about some of the big hits: - Villa Saraceno - Villa Barbaro - Villa Cornaro - Vil…

We're starting a series exploring the work of Andrea Palladio. In his own time, Palladio was a prominent architect based in 16th century Vicenza. Subsequently he's become arguably one of the most inf…

We round off our series on Carlo Scarpa with two projects for Italian consumer electronics dynasties — the Olivetti corporation, for whom he designed a famous shop in Piazza San Marco, and the Brion-…

The Castelvecchio Museum (1959-73) in Verona is an elaborate spatial narrative, weaving together historic structures and ingenious design elements to create a fragmentary and multi-layered story abou…

We talked about Carlo Scarpa's work at the Querini Stampalia foundation (1959-63), a palazzo-museum in Venice. Scarpa's interventions are focussed on the ground floor spaces, including a new entrance…

In our first episode on Carlo Scarpa, we're trying something new! We've made a video to accompany the episode that you can find on our YouTube Channel, in which you can watch Luke and George discuss …

In the final episode in our series on Ian Nairn, we discussed the 1967 book 'Britain's Changing Towns' and the BBC television work that has granted Nairn a viral afterlife on YouTube.

Here's the Nair…

In the second episode of our series on Ian Nairn, we talked about Nairn's London, the 1966 architectural guide to the city which was the critic's magnum opus. We discussed his inimitable prose style,…

The first episode in our new series on the work of architectural critic Ian Nairn. In this first episode we discussed his breakout work for the Architectural Review, Outrage, which railed against 'su…

Our final episode on Otto Wagner considers his relationship to modernism, asking whether Wagner was a predecessor to modernism. We discussed his most modern building, the Österreichische Postsparkass…

In the penultimate episode in our series on Otto Wagner, we discussed Wagner's most famous projects, the art nouveau works produced at the height of the Vienna Secession. We talked about the Majolika…

This is a preview of our latest bonus episode on Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession, get access to the full episode on our Patreon.

In this episode we discussed the work of the Vienna Secession be…

In this episode, we talked about the middle stage of Otto Wagner's career, primarily his work on the infrastructure of the city of Vienna. Visit our instagram and Twitter for pictures of the dams, ra…

In our second episode on Otto Wagner, we discussed a couple of Wagner's early buildings, specifically the Landerbank in Vienna and the Rumbach Street Synagogue in Budapest. Both are tantalising glimp…

This is the first episode in our new series on Otto Wagner. In it we discussed 19th century Vienna, an ancient city wracked by extremes of urbanisation and population boom; political radicalism and r…

This is a preview of a bonus episode we published on Patreon as part of our series of WG Sebald's 'Austerlitz', subscribe to our Patreon to subscribe and get access to our back catalogue of bonus epi…

Our second episode on WG Sebald's 2001 novel 'Austerlitz', encountering strangely preserved rooms, nightmarish dream landscapes, gigantesque 19th century fantasies, and a mix of psychoanalysis, Perra…