Us Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love

Today host George Smart and special guest cohost Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell dives into two Modernist house museums by internationally famous architects: Richard Neutra’s VDL house in LA and Philip Johnson’s Glass house in New Canaan CT. Richard Neutra became one of the most important architects in the world. In fact, Time Magazine featured Neutra on its cover and ranked him second only to Frank Lloyd Wright. Our first guest is Sarah Lorenzen, Director of the Neutra's VDL house in Los Angeles, a place where he experimented with new Modernist building materials and techniques.  Philip Johnson was an architect but he thrived on being a kingmaker to the growing Modernist movement.  He organized the profoundly influential exhibition on International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 which introduced important Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. Joining the conversation is Cole Akers of the Glass House, former home to Johnson and his partner David Whitney in

Palm Springs has a huge architecture event called Modernism Week every February.  It’s a fascinating array of architecture, lectures, parties, tours, exhibits, and the occasional plastic surgery gone awry.  Host George Smart was there earlier this year talking with nearly all the speakers, authors, and special guests who make the week (actually 11 days) a blast! 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

New York City architects Abby Suckle and William Singer are the authors of Cocktails and Conversations: Dialogues in Architectural Design.  AIA New York’s Center for Architecture has a great Friday night format:  invite people to to hear a famous architect paired with a master bartender who creates a custom cocktail to share with a thirsty audience.  Architects have included David Adjaye, Jeanne Gang, Peter Gluck, Frank Harmon, Tom Kundig, Daniel Libeskind, Eric Owen Moss, Billie Tsien, and Tod Williams, among many others. Host George Smart spoke with Abby and William at the Long Island Bar, 110 Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn. Joining them were David Moo and Toby Cecchini (inventor of the Cosmopolitan!), master bartenders behind all the cocktail creations.   About a month later, George and co-host Tom Guild met Australian Phillip Jones, the Martini Whisperer, poolside at the swanky Hotel Skylark in Palm Springs. For over a dozen years Jones worked as a fine dining manager and ran restaurants and events companie

Today we kick off Modernism Week coverage with internationally known architect Moshe (mo-shay) Safdie. He’s been famous for over 50 years for many brilliant buildings; first as architect for Habitat 67 in Montreal, in the 2000’s as architect for the Marina Bay Sands, that crazy rich Singapore hotel featured in the movie Crazy rich Asians; and for a special small chapel you might not know about. Safdie won the 2019 Wolf Prize in Architecture and his other honors include the AIA Gold Medal, Canada’s Royal Architectural Institute Gold Medal, and The Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement.  Host George Smart talked with Safdie from the somewhat noisy atrium lobby of the Hyatt Palm Springs.

USModernist has documented thousands of mid-century modernist houses, especially in Los Angeles.  One name that kept popping up when those mid-century moderns needed renovation is Los Angeles architect Barbara Bestor. She’s referred to as the unofficial Mayor of Silver Lake, an area full of great Modernist houses. She also has a robust commercial practice, including the Beats Electronics Headquarters, the Nasty Gal Headquarters, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Ashes + Diamonds Winery and Event Center and the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.  She has taught architecture at Harvard, UCLA, and now at Woodbury University School of Architecture where she is executive director of the university’s Julius Shulman Institute. She is author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.  In 2017 she was elected to the AIA's College of Fellows, which is like making the Baseball Hall of Fame. And she got married in a fantastic Modernist venue that will make you super-jealous.

Most people refer to architect Mies van der Rohe as Mies, which puts him into that rare club of people known by their first names, like Cher or Sting or Wynonna.  Born in Germany, Mies was into totally architect Adolf Loos -- who famously declared that ornament is a crime and pursued unadorned Modernist design to represent the new era of technology and production. Mies got worldwide attention with two projects, the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugenhat. He joined the avant-garde Bauhaus school as director of architecture and left Germany in 1937 to head up the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. He designed many buildings on that campus including Crown Hall for the School of Architecture. Along with Gropius and Lecorbusier, Mies is widely regarded as one of the masters of Modernist architecture. Mies died fifty years ago in 1969.  One of this three daughters was named Marianne, and her son became a talented architect in his own right. Dirk Lohan, grandson of Mies van de

Architect Victor Sidy was Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin with campuses in Scottsdale, Arizona and Spring Green, Wisconsin. He was a vocal advocate for saving Frank Lloyd Wright houses and buildings and for walkable community development.  In 2015 he returned to private practice but is still involved with one special Frank Lloyd Wright house in Phoenix, the David and Gladys Wright House, which father Frank designed for his son. The house has been on a rollercoaster in recent years, doomed one moment, saved the next, in limbo the next. Historian Alison King is founder of Modern Phoenix and is Associate Professor of Design at The Art Institute of Phoenix.  Since 2003 she has published Arizona's largest website for  midcentury architecture, ModernPhoenix.net, and she hosts an annual home tour and the always interesting Modern Phoenix Week. Alison gave USModernist a wonderful tour last November of both residential and commercial modernist buildings, culminating in a trip to the D

USModernist took 25 fans of the podcast to tour Phoenix, Arizona last November. Phoenix is the home of the Chimichanga, which Tucson disputes, but more importantly for us, the city is home to some really great Modernist architecture.  We saw the Musical Instrument Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Paulo Soleri’s Cosanti and Arcosanti, Wright’s First Christian Church, and the David and Gladys Wright House, among many other amazing buildings.  One of these was Phoenix Central Library, designed by Arizona’s Will Bruder. Largely self-trained, Bruder apprenticed with Paolo Soleri in woodwork, metal work, and masonry and contributed to Soleri's book Arcology. After graduating from college in 1969, Bruder apprenticed with Gunnar Birkerts, assisting in design of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He opened his first studio in 1974 and in 1987 was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome.  Host George Smart interviewed Bruder in the lobby of the Embassy Suites right off Central Avenue, just a few block

Ah, Cape Cod, the arm-shaped stretch of Massachusetts where Boston goes in the summer.  The sun.  The ocean.  The traffic.  The clam chowder.  The summer theatre productions.  And best of all, except for perhaps the clam chowder, the modern architecture by Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, and others. There are more than 100 modernist houses representing a little-known treasure map of residential architecture.  Our guest Peter McMahon is Principal of PM Design.  Peter curated an exhibition on Cape Cod Modernist architecture for the Provincetown Art Museum.  This led to the creation of the unique and highly effective Cape Cod Modern House Trust, which documents and preserves these houses and makes them available for the public to stay in.  His own summer house in Wellfleet MA was published in House Beautiful and Outside and he is co-author with Christine Cipriani of Cape Cod Modern: Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape. 

Every fall, the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) premieres the best new documentaries of the year. Host George Smart was on the scene talking with the people behind the new movies. Ultan Guilfoyle’s award-winning films have been shown on PBS and HBO in the US and the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 in the UK. He is author of two books about design, and with Sydney Pollack, Guilfoyle produced Sketches of Frank Gehry. His latest film is Frank Gehry: Building Justice where architect Gehry, philanthropist George Soros, and students at SCI-ARC and Yale re-design prison architecture for the complex social, political, racial, and aesthetic issues behind incarceration.  Paul Clemence is co-producer with Aksel Stasny of the film Two Pianos. His book on Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House remains the most complete photo documentation of that iconic design, and his many photographs have appeared in Metropolis, ArchDaily, Architizer, Casa Vogue Brasil, and his own blog Archi-photo with nearly 1M followers wo

We love realtors, and we also know many who would rather tear mid-century Modernist houses down than find new caring owners. That's ok, because there are realtors like today's guests who are passionate advocates for Modernist houses and go the extra mile. Martie Lieberman is a real estate agent with fans all over the world for mid-century modern and unique architectural houses. Martie was the force behind a resurgence of interest in the preservation of modern houses in Sarasota, Florida, and she created the Sarasota Architectural Foundation (SAF).  She has been honored with the Florida AIA's Bob Graham Award for promoting and preserving Modernist design.   Chris Menrad has been part of the Palm Springs real estate community for over 10 years. The stock trader-turned-real estate agent represents some of the most stunning mid-century modern houses on the market.  He came to Palm Springs in 1999 and bought a Modernist house by architect Bill Krisel plus he has restored five mid-century modern houses in Palm Spri

Watergate has come to mean scandal, usually but not always, political. The gate part is used as a suffix for other scandals in everything from sports to entertainment to media.  Along with co-host Erin Sterling Lewis, winner of the 2018 AIA Young Architects Awards, host George Smart welcomes Joe Rodota, author of THE WATERGATE, a history of the iconic Washington DC building and some of its most famous residents. Rodota served as a writer and communications manager in the Reagan White House and as an aide to California Governors Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and other publications.  

Louis Kahn was one of the most brilliant and enigmatic architects of the 20th century.  He died in 1974. There’s an stirring and brilliant documentary about his life, filmed by his son, called My Architect.  Kahn taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania most of his career.  He didn’t do a lot of buildings, but he was famous for almost all of them plus many fascinating unbuilt projects.  One of those was the Four Freedoms memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in New York City.  It was on the drawing boards when Kahn died.  The project languished for decades and wasn’t finished until 2012.  The architecture firm Mitchell Giurgola in New York ultimately took Kahn’s design and faithfully executed it to much international acclaim.  Host George Smart does a West Wing walk n talk with Paul Broches, the Mitchell Giurgola partner in charge of Four Freedoms.  They met at the tram station on the East side, right near the Queensboro Bridge. After a while exploring the memorial, they met one o

Every fall, the New York Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF) premieres the best new documentaries of the year. Kelsey Keith, the Editor-in-Chief of Curbed, was on the ADFF discussion panel for Enough White Teacups, a film by Michelle Bauer Carpenter about using design to solve critical human problems.  Host George Smart interviewed Keith at the Curbed offices in New York where they talked about the movie as well as Paris, Candide, and tacos. The Mmuseumm is New York's smallest, barely the size of a closet, and highlights a new model of curating modern artifacts. The New York Times Style Magazine included Mmuseumm on The Cultivist’s “Top 12 International Hidden Art Gems,” and it was called curatorial genius by Steve Heller at The Atlantic. Closed for the winter, it will reopen in the spring. Greg Durrell is the producer of Design Canada, the first documentary chronicling the history of Canadian graphic design and how it shaped a nation and its people.  He is a partner at Hulse & Durrell, a Vancou

California architect John Lautner, who died in 1994, was a genius of architecture who inspired generations of fans. His houses are among the most famous ever built - because you've seen them in so may movies: Chemosphere House (Body Double), Garcia House (Lethal Weapon), Sheats Goldstein House (Big Lebowski), and Elrod House (Diamonds are Forever) are just four of his many thrilling buildings. Today's guests are two of Lautner's closest associates, people who knew him best over decades; his partner and right hand, architect of the stunning Arango House in Acapulco, Helena Arahuete, and Modernist master builder Robin Poirier.

Sekou Cooke is a Jamaican-born architect with degrees from Cornell and Harvard who is a assistant professor of Architecture at Syracuse. He is a leading columnist and lecturer advocating for more minorities in architecture.  If you think we live in a post-racial era in the profession of architecture, think again.  Minorities in 1968 made up only about 1% of the architects in America.  50 years later, we’re up to 2%.  Host George Smart spoke with Cooke at the AIA New York Center for Architecture where Cooke has a major exhibition on through January 12 called Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip Hop Architecture. Hip-hop is a cultural movement established by Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s.  Hip hop has profoundly affected music and all of the arts. It has emerged not only as an influence on architecture but something bursting to produce its own unique architecture."

Michigan, that fine state shaped like your hand, is a hotbed of amazing Modernism.  Today George Smart and co-host Bob Langford chat with three knowledgeable guests about Michigan Modern.  Michael Dow is President of the Alden and Vada Dow Family Foundations based in a town where the cherry pie is always amazing, Charlevoix Michigan.  Established in 1960, the Foundation benefits central Michigan. He’s the son of architect Alden Dow, who took a sharp left from the Dow family chemical business and became a world-class Modernist architect based in Midland Michigan.  You’ve heard a lot over the last few years about Columbus, Indiana, but Midland ranks right up there as one of the most remarkable Modernist enclaves in America.  Susan Bandes is Professor of Art History and Director of Museum Studies at Michigan State University. She ran MSU's Kresge Art Museum which is now the Broad Art Museum and curated exhibitions on Frank Lloyd Wright, and American Modernism. She teaches Renaissance and Baroque Art, Modern Arch

Not only did Tom resupply the Cheetos and those delicious Delta airlines cookies today but we have the privilege of talking with podcast host Frances Anderton.  If you live in LA, you’re heard her since 2002 every Tuesday on KCRW and the podcast DNA which stands for Design N Architecture.  She is also a full-time producer of KCRW's national and local current affairs shows To The Point and Which Way, LA?  We’ve been fans for years, and her insightful stories and interviews inspire design fans nationwide!

We're checking out other design podcasts around the country and this week it's the host of the design podcast Convo By Design, Josh Cooperman.  Josh is a speaker, writer, publisher, host, brand manager and product designer with over 25 years in the broadcast industry including CBS Radio Motorsports and Playboy Radio. His masterful podcast Convo by Design tells powerful and inspiring stories of how architects, artists, designers, tastemakers and influencers make a difference in our lives, build their brands, and delight their clients. 

Laura Massino is LA's premier architecture tour guide and the prolific author of a series called Architecture Tours LA Guidebooks, which includes the volumes Frank Gehry Architecture, Pasadena, Downtown, Hancock Park, Hollywood, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and our favorite hood, Silver Lake.  Heather Papinchak is co-owner of Polymath Park in Acme PA.  She and her husband Tom are serial Modernists. They don’t just collect chairs and art like you do, they collect entire houses associated with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright – even moving some houses across the country – to create a fantastic 130-acre touring experience within an hour of Wright’s other landmarks, Fallingwater and Kentuck Knob, where you can stay overnight in one of the houses!