Us Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love

Today we welcome two internationally-known artists whose work focuses on mid-century identity: houses, cars, stores, and the relaxed sunny lifestyle to which we all would like to become  accustomed.  Danny Heller from Desert Hot Springs CA and John Pirman from Sarasota FL create bright and uplifting paintings and prints that make you smile. Their colorful, engaging portrayals of mid-century architecture and lifestyle bring joy to the world through showings in galleries and in thousands of homes.  

There’s a shining star for Robert and Helene Alexander on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars - installed last February during Modernism Week.  Although largely unknown outside of California, the Alexanders were critically important developers and builders to the expansion of Modernism. While other developers were afraid of Modernist design, as a lot still are today, sad to say, the Alexanders went all-in, working with important architects like William Cody and Bill Krisel to create thousands of homes we love around Palm Springs. Host George Smart talks with Jill Alexander Kitnick, daughter of the Alexanders, and Jim Harlan, author of a new book on the Alexanders.  Later in the show, George and Tom chat with special musical guest Colleen Duffy from Devil Doll, singing from her new album plus her biggest hit Bourbon in your Eyes. 

Host George Smart talks with two architects in New York the day before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.  Born in Russia, raised in Canada, and now living in the US, architect Julia Gamolina has been a runaway success as the founder of Madame Architect, publishing over 100 interviews with women who advance the practice of architecture and affiliated fields, celebrating women from different generations, countries, and corners of the industry. Then it’s a subway ride to meet Gene Kaufman, the most successful hotel architect in New York and the head of legendary design firm Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman.

Nowhere in the world celebrates Modernism better than Palm Springs, California. Every February, they have a huge architecture and design festival called Modernism Week which actually lasts 11 days. We were there interviewing nearly all the major speakers and special guests. When we can't go to Modernist houses ourselves, architectural photographers bring them to us, both new and iconic, by waking up at 5am to get the right light, or taking hours to set up a shot only available a few minutes. Hired by architects, magazines, and occasionally clients, architectural photographers ultimately become historians, their body of work becoming a visual timeline to the evolution of design, materials, and photography itself. Darren Bradley travels the world on architecture assignments and runs the wildly successful Instagram feed @modarchitecture. In 1998, he and his wife rented a mid-century modern house in Palm Springs, and he was smitten. He began researching, exploring and appreciating modernist architecture more and

You don’t typically think of bridges as architecture, not the highway ones, particularly.  There are about 600,000 in the US, with only a few dozen getting anyone excited, and most of those like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge were built nearly 100 years ago.  Today from the UK we welcome Martin Knight, an architect whose heralded bridges worldwide create portals to cities while helping cars, trains, and pedestrian traffic from one place to another. Founded in 2006, his firm won several high-profile international design projects and what soon will be the longest bridge in Helsinki, Finland.  He joins us from just outside of London in a place called Taplow, which is an award-winning 1966 Modernist area designed by Eric Lyons.

In the first of two shows on Modernist interiors and interior designers, host George Smart chats poolside with two organizers of the Alexander Girard exhibition held during Modernism Week at the Palm Springs Museum of Art, Christine Marvin of Marvin Windows and Doors and Michela O’Connor Abrams of MOCA+, and later he talks about interior designers Steve Chase and Arthur Elrod with former Chief Curator of the Museum, Katherine Hough, who worked with them both.

There's a new streaming series on AppleTV+ called Home, nine shows about unusual houses around the world.  George Smart talks with one of Home's Story Producers Loren Gomez about two of those houses, one in Sweden that's totally enclosed by a greenhouse and one in Texas that's pretty much underground.

Today you’ll meet two CEO’s of HOK, one of the most successful architecture firms in the world, past CEO Patrick MacLeamy and current CEO Bill Hellmuth.  Every architecture student knows HOK, and it’s one of the largest design firms in the US with 1800 team members.  Since 1955, HOK has designed hundreds of major projects like the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in DC, Apple’s first major campus in Cupertino, the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, Orioles Baseball Park in Baltimore, the expansion of Saarinen's Dulles Airport, the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport, DFW Airport in Dallas, and last but not least, the renovation of Joe Biden’s least favorite airport, LaGuardia.  Wrapping up, a few minutes with architect Frank Harmon, reading from his book Native Places.

Nowhere in the world celebrates Modernism better than Palm Springs, California.  Every February, they have a huge architecture and design festival called Modernism Week which actually lasts 11 days.  Today in the first of two shows about architecture-related movies taped at Modernism Week, host George Smart talks with filmmakers Jake and Tracey Gorst of Frey Part 2: The Architectural Interpreter, and later he visits with P. David Ebersole and Todd Hughes, directors of the new Pierre Cardin film, House of Cardin.

Today on USModernist Radio it's a full slate of great guests:  art collector, model collector, race car driver, softball player, and architect Ronnette Riley, project lead for the Lipstick Building in New York designed by Philip Johnson. Later on, Virginia Faust talks about the venerable Lustron, the house of the future that didn't make it, plus special musical guest Leonardo with the world's only Lustron song, and a new feature - architect Frank Harmon reading from his new book of sketches and essays, Native Places. 

Other than Frank Sinatra, there are few people who are so tightly woven into the spirit of mid-century culture than 1950's Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe. Sometime later this year, plans call for a nearly 30 foot tall statue of her in the famous blowing white dress to return to Palm Springs as a permanent home.  In her day, Marilyn was as big as any celebrity you could name.  She was involved with some of the most well-known men in the world:  baseball great Joe Dimaggio, playwright Arthur Miller, and generally accepted nowadays, John F. Kennedy. And she has a connection to a very famous architect. Hosts George Smart and Tom Guild talk with three people who keep Marilyn’s legacy alive for the 21st century. First, it’s Sunny Thompson, who has been channeling Marilyn in her live shows and completely brings her back to life. Next, Greg Schreiner, who has one of the worlds largest collections of Marilyn’s costumes and also leads the annual memorial service in Los Angeles, and finally, Joshua Greene, son of photogr

In a mid-century world way before Instagram, people kept up with the latest buildings primarily through architecture magazines.  Although a few titles like Architecture Record are still going, there were many exceptional publications that in their heyday from 1945-1970 reached millions of readers across the US and the World. Today we welcome John Morris Dixon, the last editor of one of those great magazines, Progressive Architecture. Dixon has interviewed and written about just about every Modernist architect we’ve ever mentioned on the show, and his books include Paul Rudolph: Inspiration and Process in Architecture, Urban Spaces 1&2, Progressive Architecture’s Twenty Years of Design Awards, and Pencil Points Reader.

Craig Ellwood was one of the most exciting people in American architecture. He took Los Angeles by storm and no one since has fully captured his personal style or his incredible story - but that's on the way. Although he took structural engineering courses at UCLA, Ellwood was not a licensed architect, but that did not matter to him or to his clients. Ellwood was a true design genius. Ellwood could sell, too.  He had a red Ferrari (among other great cars) and was a perfect fit with the celebrity culture of Los Angeles. He was a master of promotion. Derided by the architecture profession of which he was formally not a part, he rose to public fame when three of his houses were included in the iconic Case Study House series for Arts and Architecture Magazine. His houses are still incredibly prized today.  From poolside at the swanky Hotel Skylark, host George Smart interviews noted Ellwood restorer Barton Jahncke and his client, Ellwood owner Diane Bald, and later on George talks with architects of another Ellwo

Skidmore Owings and Merrill, which sounds like a law firm your uncle Mitch might work at, created international airports, stunningly tall skyscrapers, universities, flagship museums, and landmark corporate headquarters since the 1930’s. In its heyday it was the Amazon of design firms, one of the largest in the world, with projects such as the 1973 Sears/Willis Tower in Chicago, the 2010 Burj Khalifa in Dubai, international airport terminals in Chicago and Kansas City, Lever House, the 2013 World Trade Center, the new Penn Station, the Waldorf Astoria restoration, the first net-zero-energy school in New York City, and even the design of Moon Village, a concept for the first permanent lunar settlement. It's a global architectural, urban planning, and engineering firm, founded in Chicago by architects Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings and engineer John O. Merrill.   Today we talk about SOM with Nick Adams, author of Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism and architect, preservationist, and desig

Nowhere in the world celebrates Modernism better than Palm Springs, California.  Every February, they have a huge architecture and design festival called Modernism Week, which actually lasts 11 days. This was the fifth year USModernist has been at Modernism Week, talking poolside at the USModernist Compound, aka the hip Hotel Skylark, with nearly all the keynote speakers, authors, and special guests. When modern-day Dorothy's kick their red ruby slippers together, they don’t go to Kansas, they land next to in Frank Sinatra’s pool in Palm Springs. Modernism Week is a dazzling spectacle of mid-century architecture, martinis, lectures, art galleries, shopping, nonprofit benefit events, architecture documentary premieres, amazing parties at incredible houses, brilliantly curated house tours, detailed art and architecture exhibits, and much more.   Today we kick off 2020 Modernism Week coverage with architect Daniel Libeskind, known for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, the master plan for the World Trade Cen

In a world before the internet, World’s Fairs were the killer app of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries.  Countries would assemble at a central place for about 6 months and build pavilions, each sharing their nation’s technology, culture, and national sources of pride, symbols, heroes, and achievements.  If you’ve ever been to Epcot at Disney World, you get the idea.  There were two World's Fairs in New York about 25 years apart.  Much of the World’s fair architecture was forward-thinking and Modernist, but only a few buildings on the New York fairgrounds survive today, some of them barely.  We welcome two superfans who’ve been working over ten years to restore what’s left, Mitch Silverstein and Stephanie Bohn, both featured in the documentary Modern Ruin, produced by past podcast guest Matt Silva, detailing the site’s post-fair use, deterioration, and growing advocacy efforts.

Each fall, there’s a cool art and design gathering called WestEdge Design Fair in Santa Monica.  It’s held in the Barker Hanger, an enormous space at the Santa Monica airport.  This year, USModernist's George Smart moderated two panels with some of the most well-known designers from around America and the UK. What you’re about to hear is one of those panels, Epic Spaces and Favorite Places, with guests Tom Parker, Alison Pickart, David Thompson, John McClain, and Massimo Buster Minale. This is a rebroadcast of Josh Cooperman’s Convo by Design, the official podcast of WestEdge, which recorded the panel.  Many thanks to Josh and WestEdge for allowing us to share this with you directly.  Enjoy!

From London to Tokyo to Dubai, the skyscraper is a part of every modern city, but no city has done it better, or longer, than New York. Starting in the 1920's, the booming economy, use of steel, and advanced engineering took skyscrapers into reality for the first time.  Hey, who wakes up one day and says "Hey, I want to create a museum"?  Carol Willis does.  In 1996, she founded and still runs the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan which explains the history, allure, and future of tall buildings - plus a new class of thin and incredibly expensive structures called supertall.  

Host George Smart cashed in a few frequent flyer miles to report from New York City, doing a walk and talk around the innovatively designed COOKFOX architecture office with project leader Bethany Borel.  Later on George visits author Anthony Alofsin, whose new book Wright and New York: the Making of America's Architect explores Frank Lloyd Wright’s years in the Big Apple. 

What could be better than to make a living writing about Modernist architecture?  Today on the show all the way from the UK, its author Dominic Bradbury, author of the new book Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses.  Bradbury is a writer and freelance journalist specializing in architecture, design, real estate, and travel, writing over 20 over twenty books, at least one of which you have on your coffee table:  Nordic Houses, Mid-Century Modern Complete, The Iconic House, The Iconic Interior, Off the Grid, Making House: Designers at Home, and his newest book the massive Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses.  He writes for the Financial Times, The Telegraph, House & Garden, World of Interiors, Wallpaper, Vogue Living and various editions of Architectural Digest and Elle Decoration.