Us Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love

In this our last show from Modernism Week 2022, we close out with fascinating poolside conversations with speakers from the week! Aaron Betsky is a household name, if your house is full of architects.  He’s a critic, curator, educator, and lecturer who is Director of the Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design.  Betsky is joined today with returning podcast guest Andrew Pielage, an internationally published architecture and travel photographer who, like Star Trek, is on a multi-year mission to photograph every single Frank Lloyd Wright building. Aaron and Andrew brought us the new book 50 Lessons to Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright. Returning guest, architect and author Alan Hess has been on this show more times than anyone.  If you’re old enough to remember Johnny Carson, Alan is the Charles Nelson Reilly of USModernist Radio.  A longtime advocate for Modernist preservation, he is a prolific author with some 20 books. He’s the top presenter every year at Modernism Week. Returning guest, fashion designer

Edward Killingsworth graduated from USC in 1940 and was the most prolific creator of Case Study Houses – a project sponsored by Arts and Architecture Magazine to provide affordable housing for returning WWII soldiers and their families.  These architects included Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, Rodney Walker, and the fast and furious Craig Ellwood, among others. Killingsworth, who died in 2004, won 42 AIA award and was campus architect for Cal State Long Beach for more than 40 years. Today’s guest knew Killingsworth well and honeymooned in one of his hotels, the Kapalua Bay Hotel in Maui, sadly destroyed in 2006.  Architect Kelly Sutherlin McLeod of Long Beach specializes in historic preservation projects, working on buildings by Richard Neutra and Ed Killingworth, among many others.  She also bought his office!  Later on, swing jazz with musical guest Laura Windley.  

Colin Flavin, founder of Flavin Architects, has been building modern houses in New England for more than 30 years. An avid sketch artist and an MIT grad, Colin spoke at Modernism Week on East Coast modernist residential architecture and its impact on community design.  Author and artist Justin Beal went to Yale and USC and his art is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the LA Museum of Contemporary Art. Now a professor at Hunter College, Justin’s most recent project is Sandfuture, a look at life and work of Minoru Yamasaki, who came to fame through the Lambert-St. Louis airport and his most heralded creation, the original World  Trade Center twin towers in New York City.  Later on, we visit with pop and jazz superstar Toni Tennille, the next Dolly Levi, and then sadly, our last segment with TikTok design critic Louisa Whitmore, as she leaves the show to attend University and a bright promising future.  

Going back as far as Neutra and Schindler, it has always been hard as an architect to specialize in houses - and even harder to specialize in Modernist houses. Clients, even the most forward-thinking, collaborative, affluent clients, are time-consuming - when for the same amount of time you could design a 120,000 square foot office building for a much bigger fee. So those architects who are prolific with modernist houses and do it well are hard to find - and we love'em. Toshiko Mori, Annabelle Selldorf, Rick Joy, and past podcast guests Tom Kundig and Will Bruder are in this league, and with them, today's guest - architect and furniture designer David Thompson of Assembledge+ in Los Angeles. The son of architect Richard Thompson, David worked for Syndesis and Lorcan O'Herlihy before establishing Assembledge+ in 1997. David's houses are classic California Modernism, and if you want him to design your new house, lure him with sushi and a freshly-made Manhattan. Later on, musical guest Louise Cappi and a few min

Architect Eddie Jones is founder of Jones Studio, based in Phoenix AZ.  He began practice in 1979, starting out with a T-square, some pencils, and a desk in his Ralph Haver-designed house.  His book, Jones Studio House: Sensual Modernism, looks back on Eddie’s quiet yet influential forty-year career through photos and personal stories. Award-winning landscape architect Signe Nielsen designed the amazing landscape of Little Island at Pier 55 in New York City, a magnificent “floating park” above the Hudson River that opened in May 2021.  As founding principal of Matthews Nielsen Landscape Architects, Signe has spent more than 25 years reinvigorating modern urban spaces, including midcentury icons such as the Lincoln Center and the TWA Hotel. She is a professor of urban design and landscape architecture at Pratt and is past president of the New York City Public Design Commission.

Eero Saarinen, who died in 1961, is now one of the most well-known and respected Modernist architects in history, famous for the St. Louis Arch, the TWA Terminal at JFK, Dulles Airport, and many other innovative projects. More that about any other architect, his work signaled an optimistic future, a sweeping beautiful, curvy future that was going to require, as the song would say decades later, shades. But Saarinen wasn't always so well-known, and for about eight years before his death, there was one incredibly smart and talented woman who built and managed Saarinen's reputation into the mega-star he is today. We are joined by author Eva Hagberg, with the new book When Eero Met His Match: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect. And later, somewhat miraculously, we found Ruth Clements Pudists, Eero Saarinen's secretary, still in her 90's. With a memory better than any of us, she was there during the growth of the Saarinen practice and made arrangements with Aline when he died.

Today we travel to three sunny destinations featured at this year’s Modernism Week lectures: Florida, Cuba, and San Diego. The New York Times calls Charles Phoenix “the King of Retro” for his spirited and hilarious slide shows celebrating the midcentury American lifestyle. He started collecting vintage Kodachrome slides in the 1990s and has been giving talks and creating colorful coffee table books, a YouTube video series of classic car joyrides, and fun double decker bus tours during Modernism Week. 90 miles south of Florida, there’s Cuba. The US can’t quite decide whether we’re still mad at Cuba, but the architecture lives on and architect Monty Freeman knows all about it. An award-winning New York architect who has repurposed timeless, modern spaces around the world, Monty is an expert on Cuban architecture and leads architectural tours when the US allows it. Keith York buys and sells architect-designed homes in San Diego. He created the Modern San Diego website to help the community understand the area’s

Earlier this year, our friends the Classicists gathered to discuss traditional and classical architecture. As the day unfolded, Modernism was predictably and continually pounded as the cause of all kinds of awful consequences on humanity. In football the referee would blow the whistle at this point for piling on. Then one lone voice of reason stood up. Today we welcome Melissa Delvecchio of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, or RAMSA, and later musical guest Paul Marinaro.

Like so many people, Erik Rosenow moved to Palm Springs for his love of midcentury architecture. He bought a 1959 Donald Wexler-designed house in El Rancho Vista Estates, founded a neighborhood community organization, and became President of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, where he’s still on the Board. He now lives in a 1970s brutalist townhome attributed to William Cody. Erik is the author of The Architecture of Desert Leisure, with wonderful vintage photographs and advertisements to honor condos, the buildings that like Rodney Dangerfield, don’t get much respect. Judith Chafee studied at Yale under architect Paul Rudolph. In 1959 she was the first woman to win the Koppers Architectural Student Design Competition - however, the award ceremony was held in a men's club and Chafee had to go through the kitchen to receive the plaque. She received a BA and MA in architecture from Yale in 1960 as the only woman in her class and worked for firms such as Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, Edward Larrabee Barne

Today we’re talking about Phoenix, Arizona, home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Modernist architect Al Beadle, and the world’s worst-named golf tournament, the Waste Management Open. Joining us is Phoenix architect John Anderson of 180 Degrees and legendary founder of Modern Phoenix.net, historian and preservationst Alison King.

Modernism Week in Palm Springs is a world-famous event but once you’re there you can see how important it is to local people, economy, and preservation movement.  Modernism Week began in 2006 as an offshoot of the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale, which continues, and the annual Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture & Design Council Symposium, which did not.  In February 2020, right before COVID, attendance was estimated at 162,000 across 375 events with people from all 50 and 25 countries, including our favorite guys and gals, Australian, who fly a long way to attend each year.  We’ll talk with Modernism Week board members Gary Johns and Michelle Boudreau, Palm Springs historian Steven Keylon, and Urban Palm Springs CEO Deiter Crawford.

It’s not easy getting people to admit something is a problem, then getting agreement on a solution, then finding the political will and money to get anything implemented. Architectural scholars offer intricate and complex design analysis for even larger and more complex social problems. Design scholars have their own rhythmic and intense way of writing as they search to provide meaningful analysis about buildings, materials, design, planning, and social impact. All this can be a little intimidating for the general public. Imagine if Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang theory studied architecture instead of physics. Yet scholars are the R&D department for innovations that may come 5, 10, or even 50 years later. Joining us are two of the most celebrated, most wicked smart design authors - Joseph Giovannini and Kenneth Frampton. Later, music by the lovely and charming Ilene Graff. 

Ron Hinklin is the most famous voice you’ve never heard of. A successful singer since his junior high school days, Ron led the group responsible for some of the most iconic sounds of the 1970s, including vocals on the Partridge Family hit “I Think I Love You,” for which Ron and his group nabbed a Grammy nomination. He also sang some of TV’s most memorable theme songs like MASH, That Girl, Batman, Happy days, Laverne and Shirley, and the famous Mickey D jingle You Deserve a Break Today. Popular music, from Big Band to Swing to Rock, had album covers and liner notes that inspired Americans yearning to be more modern. All this helped generate today’s huge consumer culture, and it’s the subject of a new book. Author Janet Borgerson is the senior Wicklander fellow at the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul. Author Jonathan Schroeder is Professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology. Together, they wrote Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America.

Michelangelo Sabatino is a professor in the IIT College of Architecture. He has trained as an architect, preservationist, and architecture-art-design historian and has served on a number of not-for-profit organization boards ranging from the Society of Architectural Historians to Docomomo International. His books include Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone and his latest, co-authored with Susan Benjamin, Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses, 1929-1975. Later on, our oldest guest yet at 100, architect Helen Staley. And he's still got it after all these years, formerly Ralph Malph on Happy Days, singer Don Most.

The development of four-lane highways and interstates in the 1950’s and 1960’s created a huge surge in car travel.  In a time before the minivan, families would pile in the station wagon or the Airstream and hit the road to discover America.  Roadside motels sprung up everywhere and car culture exploded.  Sports cars like the wildly famous Mustang defined cool, and what better than to drive around LA or Palm Springs, or anywhere, really, than in a cool car.  Today we explore cars and trailers and Modernism with three guests:  Susan Skarsgard, author of Where Today Meets Tomorrow: Eero Saarinen and the General Motors Technical Center; Tom Dolle and Jeff Stork, authors of Glamour Road: Color, Fashion, Style, and the Midcentury Automobile, and returning podcast guest Eric Bricker, producer of Alumination, a new film about the iconic Airstream travel trailer.

Design critic Inga Saffron is the Philadelphia Inquirer’s most feared columnist. Raised in Levittown NY she always wanted to be a newspaper reporter - and her first beat was the Girl Scout newspaper.  She attended New York University, studied in France, and settled in Dublin, Ireland writing Irish publications and Newsweek. Joining the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1984, from 1994-1998, she was their Moscow correspondent and covered the Yugoslav Wars and First Chechen War. Since 1999, she has written an architecture criticism column titled "Changing Skyline" winning multiple awards including the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award, the Vincent Scully Prize, and the big one, the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Later on, the Inga Saffron of the 2040's, TikTok architecture critic Louisa Whitmore.

Every strong passion has … a gift shop ... with art capturing the enthusiast's lifestyle.  If you’re into Star Wars or golf or architecture, the world’s artists have plenty of wonderful paintings and prints to illuminate your walls.  Today we talk from Modernism Week 2022 with two artists, Josh Agle (aka Shag) and Carrie Graber, whose works hang in hundreds if not thousands of Modernist houses and many more non-Modernist houses of architecture fans.  Later on back in the studio, music with jazz singer Gina Eckstine, daughter of Billy Eckstine.

One of the most well-known New York design educators, Daniella Ohad of Daniella on Design was former sergeant in the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. She graduated from Tel Aviv University and moved to New York for a Masters from FIT and a PhD from Bard. Now she's an influencer, historian, writer, talk show host, curator, and keynote speaker. She’s committed to design education and has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Pratt, Parsons, Cooper Union, and the New York School of Interior Design. She curated and hosted events at AIA New York, the venerable 92nd Street Y; the talk show Spring/Harvest Dialogues; the video series The Collector; and the Italian network Skyarte. Her blog Daniella on Design attracts hundreds of thousands of readers weekly.

In our 5th show from Modernism Week 2022, George and Tom talk with owners of significant Modernist houses, plus one very lucky houseguest:  Ronnie Sassoon who's owned houses by Hal Levitt, Richard Neutra, and Breuer; Alfonso Cordon and Cord Struckmann of Beverly Thorne's Case Study House 26; and coming into town from LA just for this interview, the man, the myth, the legend, the Kato Kaelin of his generation, Josh Gorrell.  Later on, in the last of our series from his new novel, Death by Design at Alcatraz, a reading by architect and author Anthony Poon.

Here’s the story…of a lovely lady….who hired a world-famous architect to design a small but spectacular house in Plano, Illinois, along the Fox River.  Things didn’t work out so well, and unfortunately Dr. Edith Farnsworth’s story has been told largely from the perspective of that world-famous architect.  Joining us today to share Edith’s story, and what happened to the house, are professors Nora Wendl and Alice Friedman.