About Buildings + Cities

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 sli…

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 (Goth…

John Ruskin’s ‘Stones of Venice’ is one of the monuments of architectural theory in the 19th century. But it’s a hard book to get through, or to get inside. It’s incredibly long, and animated by a ki…

A short post-script to the Space Age episodes — we talked to Fred Scharmen about the mid 1970s NASA Space Settlements design study.

You can read his essay at Places Journal where you can also see a …

The second part of our discussion of '2001 — A Space Odyssey'.

At a certain point quite early on we started referring to the Monolith as 'the Obelisk' and neither of us noticed. Oh well.

Thanks for…

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001 a space odyssey is the iconic depiction of space travel, channeling the optimism and excitement of radical advances in space exploration and technology. It’s an uncom…

The 1990s were when computers really entered the mainstream of architecture. The rise of personal computing, with wider access to inexpensive machines, the world wide web, advances in software and ha…

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Projects like the Villa Stein and Villa Savoye are icons of modernist architecture — among the most famous of a…

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…

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Bernard Rudofsky’s exhibition Architecture Without Architects at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 19…

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 moder…

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 …

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 ho…

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 detrac…

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…

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 l…

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…

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 Architectu…

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 ter…

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, provinci…