Us Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love

Sometimes the controversy about a building, particularly about a huge museum or government project, starts way before it opens or even before a Mayor, or a Governor, a Prime Minister, or even a Kardashian moves the first shovel of dirt. Today we welcome Susanna Sirefman, founder and president of Dovetail Design Strategists, an architect selection firm specializing in design competitions.  Also with us, not by coincidence, Robby Johnston from Raleigh Architecture, a North Carolina firm thinking about entering national design competitions.  Most public projects in the US are chosen by a committee that reviews architects past projects. Entering a competition is a time-consuming task generating high-detail photos and renderings that while the winner may or may not get a huge commission, there are no promises and typically no compensation for the time spent entering.  The carrot at the end of the process is what propels firms, small and large, to put in the time and expense towards what could be a career-defining

Alysa Nahmias is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of the Los Angeles-based production company Ajna Films. Her directorial debut feature, Unfinished Spaces, co-directed with Benjamin Murray, won a 2012 Spirit Award, numerous festival prizes, and is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  In The New Bauhaus, the film's narrative weaves original interviews with archival footage, voiceover, and stylized filming of documents and artwork. The result is a new perspective view of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a man who was ahead of his time creating a philosophy of art and design education that has captured imaginations for nearly a century.  Akira Boch is an award-winning filmmaker and Director of the Media Arts Center at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. He has made over 50 short films, documentaries, and music videos.  His latest film, Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience explores five second generation Japanese American artists—Ruth Asaw

Charles Gwathmey was a native of North Carolina and got interested in architecture at an early age. Charlie, as he was known, studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and at Yale University under Paul Rudolph, then went into partnership with Richard Henderson and later Robert Siegel.  Over a career spanning five decades, Charlie and Bob designed some of the country's most iconic Modernist houses (for celebrities and CEO's such as Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Dell) and buildings such as the Guggenheim addition and the US Mission to the UN, both in New York. Gwathmey died in 2009 but the firm lives on as Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman. Today we talk with Gwathmey’s daughter Annie Gwathmey, an actress, producer, and teacher known for films such as Romeo Must Die and My Father's House. She attended Cornell and Sarah Lawrence College and joins us from LA. With us in the studio, guest co-host Paige Wagoner Claassen, an architectural historian whose Instagram architecture feed Claasshaus has

Fire up the car or start booking plane tickets, as today we’re talking about two amazing Modernist house museums you’ll definitely want to visit, one in New York City, and one in Los Angeles, with guest Executive Directors: Kelvin Dickinson of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation and the Modulightor Building in New York, last home of architect Paul Rudolph; and Lucia Dewey Atwood of the Charles and Ray Eames House in Los Angeles.

This is the third year USModernist Radio has been part of the Architecture and Design Film Festival in New York. Every fall, the stars, producers, and creators gather to premiere their latest documentaries.  ADFF Executive Director Kyle Bergman curates visually wonderful, thought-provoking, and faithfully documented films that capture the brilliance of architects, artists, and significant buildings. Host George Smart talks with two of the filmmakers from this year’s festival:  Lene Borch Hansen, of the movie The Man & The Architect - Jørn Utzon; and Britni Harris, of the movie Goff.

In this bonus show, George gets locked out of Tom's studio but still manages to record and edit an interview with PJ Letofsky, producer of the documentary Neutra:  Survival Through Design.  Featuring historian Barbara Lamprecht, son Raymond Neutra, son Dion Neutra who just passed away, Norman Foster, Moshe Safdie, and of course -- Alan Hess.  Neutra's houses are still highly prized 50 to 90 years later, and his legacy of incredibly beautiful and functional design is still wildly popular.  George kicks off things with PJ talking about his publicity tour for the movie.

Amy Walton is from Texas, where she spent 15 years managing nonprofits like the North Texas Food Bank and the Jewish Family Service. Last year, she launched modTEXAS, an initiative to draw attention to Texas modernism and celebrate the people and institutions working to preserve it. Building a coalition of over a dozen nonprofits using social media, modTEXANS have shared thousands of images of midcentury design and architecture that can literally be mapped across the state. When you think of Albuquerque, New Mexico, you might think of southwest adobe design, or maybe that TV show In Plain Sight which filmed there for five years, but you’re certainly not thinking of Modernist architecture – yet. Thea Haver is hoping to change that as co-founder and director of Modern Albuquerque. Co-host Paige Wagoner Claassen is an architectural historian with the popular Instagram feed Claasshaus, seeking out meaning, beauty, and significance in buildings and history in objects. Co-host Wayne Pond's melodious voice hosted an

Welcome to 2020!  In our ongoing quest to seek out other architecture podcasts, we’ve talked with hosts such as Frances Anderton, Donna Sink, Steve Chung, Josh Cooperman, David+Marina, and Debbie Millman.  Today we talk with Bob Borson, creator of the most visited privately-maintained architectural blog in the world, Life of an Architect, which as of two years ago is also a podcast. We first encountered Bob’s blog in 2012 when he put out a wonderful series of hilarious architecture Christmas cards!

Shhh!  George broke into Tom's studio late at night to bring you two bonus interviews from 2019. Happy new year!

Host George Smart met today's guests at a LA party USModernist Radio threw last year at Neutra's Lovell House.  Lyra Kilston is a writer and editor focused on architecture, design, art, urbanism, with publication in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Next City, Artforum, Wired, TIME, Art in America, and ICON. She is an editor for the Getty Museum, a consulting editor for Hyperallergic, and her first book is Sun Seekers: The Cure of California. Josh Gorrell is a preservationist who worked to save Rudolph Schindler’s Van Dekker house, declared a historic landmark in 2010.  He’s either, um, housesitting or holding the occupants hostage at the Lovell Health house, Richard Neutra’s iconic Los Angeles creation that ushered in the California health craze.  Stopping by the studio, the enchanting jazz vocalist Valerie Wood.

Ron Friedman graduated in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. After working for a few years as an architect, he came to his senses and started writing and performing stand-up comedy.  He was spotted by Dean Martin and Danny Kaye which launched a career writing for countless TV and variety shows, over 700 hours of beloved prime-time TV that you know and probably love, including The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Vegas, and Fantasy Island.  If you’re younger than 45, you’ll know the G.I. Joe series and of course, the epic animated show Transformers for which Ron wrote 64 shows. He worked with the legendary Stan Lee to create The Marvel Action Hour.  He drafted the episode of Happy Days that introduced The Fonz, and he wrote the episode of Bewitched that introduced Uncle Arthur played by Paul Lynde. His new memoir is called I Killed Optimus Prime.

Born in Boston, architect Eliot Noyes graduated Harvard University. After working for Boston's Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch & Abbott, he left to work for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Awarded a Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, he toured the US visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Taliesin; Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Academy of Art; and Richard Neutra houses.  After returning briefly to Gropius and Breuer, he became the first director of the Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, launching the careers of Charles and Ray Eames.  Noyes redefined how design was perceived inside major corporations such as IBM and Mobil.  He is recognized for designing World's Fair pavilions in Brussels, Belgium, San Antonio, Montreal, and New York. He was one of the noted Harvard Five architects, which included Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, John Johansen, and Landis Gores. Our guest Fred Noyes is the son of Eliot Noyes. Fred Noyes worked for Graham Gund and Cambridge Seven and for over t

There’s a building at JFK airport in New York that people have been talking about for almost 60 years.  At one time, it was the world's most modern airport terminal, bringing the Jet Age fully into public consciousness.  This building had no peer; and its creator, Eero Saarinen, was one of the most visionary architects in the world. For years the airline TWA (later absorbed by American Airlines) used it as a glamorous gateway to the world, sending off passengers in an era people dressed up to fly and there was no such thing as airport security.  The volume of passengers increased so much that the building had to be abandoned.  After a few decades in mothballs, and dangerously close to demolition, Saarinen’s TWA terminal has been meticulously restored and expanded, with a world-class hotel adjacent and even better, a massive underground conference facility you’d never know was there. Host George Smart was in New York for a huge gala opening inside that underground conference center.  He talked with Richard Sou

Any fan of Modernism has DWELL Magazine somewhere in their house.  It’s a venerable but relatively recent publication, started in 2000 by Lara Hedberg Deam in San Francisco.  She’s still the owner, and like a winning NFL coach, she’s been stocking the team over nearly 20 years with winning players like Karrie Jacobs, Michela O'Connor Abrams, Amanda Dameron, and former podcast guest Alison Arieff.  With a motto of “at home in the Modern World,” DWELL helped re-energize a terrazzo (that’s our new collective noun) of Modern movements:  small houses, modern houses, green houses, sustainable house, micro houses, and prefab houses.  Today we go remote with host George Smart in New York, where he sits down with Bill Hanley, Editor and Chief of DWELL since February 2019. Hanley is a New York City-based writer, editor, and media producer, focusing on design, art, and urbanism. He was previously the digital director at Surface magazine, senior digital editor at Architectural Record, news editor at ARTnews, staff writer

In the lovely town of New Canaan CT, from the 1940s through the 1990s, no one was more influential than architect Philip Johnson. His internationally-famous Glass House celebrated its 70th anniversary recently with a huge outdoor party and aerial performance by Philippe Petit, known for his daring and highly unauthorized wirewalk between the World Trade Center towers pre-2001. New Canaan is full of mid-century Modernist architecture from Johnson, Eliot Noyes, Marcel Breuer, John Hedjuk, and John Johansen, collectively known as the Harvard Five, plus other architects such as Edward Durell Stone, Frank Lloyd Wright, and James Evans.  Host George Smart sat down inside the Johnson-designed 1953 Wiley House with Inger Stringfellow and Cristina Ross.

Frank Lloyd Wright, now 60 years after his death, remains the most well-known architect in America, perhaps the world.  Notorious for his ego, which was matched only by his genius and talent, Wright would be delighted to be so this famous for so long.  Wright would say, and he did, that he was the greatest architect ever, and for many, he was and still is.  Roland Reisley was only 26 when he became Wright’s client for a small house.  Now Reisley is one of Wright's last living clients, still in the same lovely house in upstate New York, a small colony of Wright houses known as Usonia. The Usonian houses were the prototype for small affordable houses across America in a post-war time when affordable housing was needed.  Unfortunately, the Usonians were not particularly economical nor small, but they remain beautiful designs that people rarely want to leave.  Our George Smart was on the road in New York and sat down with Reisley this past summer.

Lord Peter Palumbo is a developer, art collector, car collector, wine collector, architecture collector and Conservative life peer based in the UK. He was educated at Eton and Worcester College, Oxford, a star athlete who played polo with Prince Charles. He first met Mies van her Rohe in the 1960’s and spent much of the next 30 years trying to get one of his buildings built. In 1972, he purchased the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe in Plano, Illinois and in 1986 he bought Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kentuck Knob near Fallingwater in Pennsylvania. 

Architect John Lautner of Los Angeles was incredibly ahead of his time. Over 50 years, Lautner blurred the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, between nature and architecture.  He carried out 144 of his designs, 103 of which are still standing, mostly around Los Angeles, and all highly prized. Two architects in the Netherlands set out to personally discover not just a few of his projects - but ALL of them. Jan-Richard Kikkert and Tycho Saariste's new book, Lautner A-Z, has dedication and commitment and sheer perserverance to get inside almost every Lautner building.

One of the best 80s films is, the envelope please, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Here's the plot: near the end of the school year, high school senior Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick) fakes being sick to stay home. His parents believe him, though his sister Jeanie (played by Jennifer Grey, the baby you don’t back into a corner) is not convinced. Ferris persuades his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to help lure Ferris' girlfriend (Mia Sara) out of school and let them use his father's prized 1961 Ferrari. Spoiler:  that Ferrari tumbles out of a really cool Modernist house, much to the chagrin of Cameron and his dad. Our pal Bob Langford, who pretty much knows every line in the movie, drops by to help us examine this cultural icon with guest Meghann Salamasick, who with her husband Chris are the owners of the that now-famous Modernist house. Later in the show, with apologies to Wayne Newton, it's George and Bob and Tom serenading Meghann.

Returning podcast guest Pierluigi Serraino is an architect and author whose book Modernism Rediscovered contributed to the huge re-emergence of interest in the architecture we all know and love.  He has written books on Eero Saarinen, NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism, California Captured with past podcast guests Emily Bills and Sam Lubell, and his newest book co-authored with Erica Stoller, Ezra Stoller: A Photographic History of Modern American Architecture. Erica Stoller is the director of Esto, an agency representing architectural photographers and managing a massive archive of related images related to the architecture photography of her father, Ezra Stoller.  One of very best photographers of mid-Century Modernism, his work lives on in the esto archive used by scholars, photo researchers, and publishers worldwide.  In addition to running ESTO, Erica is a photographer and an artist, making wall sculpture of repurposed industrial materials like plastic plumbing tubes, foam insulation, para