In this episode, we talked about the middle stage of Otto Wagner's career, primarily his work on the infrastructure of the city of Vienna. Visit our instagram and Twitter for pictures of the dams, railway stations and bridges that shaped Viennese modernity and provided the infrastructure for this rapidly growing city.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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In our second episode on Otto Wagner, we discussed a couple of Wagner's early buildings, specifically the Landerbank in Vienna and the Rumbach Street Synagogue in Budapest. Both are tantalising glimpses of the themes that would dominate his later, most famous works.

We then discussed the architectural theory that was being produced in vast quantities in the German-speaking lands of the 19th century, specifically how they addressed the question of architectural style, posing the question 'In what style should we build?' These authors, such as Gottfried Semper, Heinrich Hübsch and Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm Bötticher offered complex justifications for different architectural styles, grounded in stories about history, structural logic, skeuomorphs and culture.

Otto Wagner plunged headlong into this debate with his 1896 book, Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to this Field of Art, which offered his own view on the answer to the style question, and prefigured many of the arguments and ideas touted by the modern movement in the 20th century.

Go to Blue Crow Media and use the offer code AboutBuildings at checkout to get 10% off your next architectural map.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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This is the first episode in our new series on Otto Wagner. In it we discussed 19th century Vienna, an ancient city wracked by extremes of urbanisation and population boom; political radicalism and revolution. A crumbling ancient order and an emerging modern metropolis came to create the Ringstraße, a vast redevelopment programme that took the empty space around the walls of the old city and filled it with vast marble institutions and speculatively built apartment complexes that came to symbolise the newly empowered liberal city.

Into this fiery melting pot came Otto Wagner, a singular architect, often hailed as a precursor to modernism, whose career we will be exploring over the course of this multi-part series (with slightly shorter episodes that we will release more regularly).

There's lots of images in this one so please come to instagram to see them!

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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This is a preview of a bonus episode we published on Patreon as part of our series of WG Sebald's 'Austerlitz', subscribe to our Patreon to subscribe and get access to our back catalogue of bonus episodes.

In this bonus episode we talked about the films of Patrick Keiller, specifically 'London' (1994) and 'Robinson in Space' (1997), a pair of meticulously observed polemical psycho-geographies, exploring the derangements and idiosyncrasies of Britain in the Long 90s. Like in the work of Sebald, a narrator stands in for Keiller, and relates to us the strange beliefs and worldview of his interlocutor, Robinson. Keiller's exploration is laboured with literary accretions, wry observations about the decline and fall of Great Britain, and more than a little righteous anger.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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Our second episode on WG Sebald's 2001 novel 'Austerlitz', encountering strangely preserved rooms, nightmarish dream landscapes, gigantesque 19th century fantasies, and a mix of psychoanalysis, Perrault's Bibliothèque Nationale, Liverpool Street Station and Casanova.

Watch Sebald giving a reading of Austerlitz and listen to an interview with him on KCRW.

This episode is sponsored by Blue Crow Media, who gorgeous architectural maps. Use the offer code aboutbuildings at checkout to get 10% off.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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In our first episode of 2021 we discussed 'Austerlitz', the final novel by W.G. Sebald. It's the story, at the most basic level, of an architectural historian, Jacques Austerlitz, who in middle age begins to rediscover his own submerged history. It's a novel driven by architectural spaces, which are mysterious containers of both individual and collective memory and history. Austeritz's own memories of his childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, his lost parents, and the bloody history of Europe itself are gradually revealed in the images and landscapes that he encounters.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show.

Our sponsor for this episode is Blue Crow Media, who produce gorgeous architectural maps of different cities, including Pyongyang, Tbilisi and New York. Use the offer code aboutbuildings for 10% off your next purchase.

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This is a preview from our latest Patreon Bonus Episode – subscribe to our Patreon for just $3 a month to listen to the whole episode! Thank you to everyone who supported the show this year, we couldn't have done it without you, and we can't wait to discuss more architectural history in 2021.

Our final episode for 2020 is here and our last episode on Jane Jacobs. We're discussing Robert Moses, the megalomaniacal titan of New York planning who wielded enormous political power and bent the metropolis to his will, orchestrating a symphony of demolitions, highways, expressways and grands projets which changed the face of the city forever.

'You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.'

He was also a spiteful bully, a racist, an egomaniac and a very difficult man, yet he maintained his authority and his power for almost 3 decades before a precipitous fall in the 1960s, when public and political opinion turned against him for good. He embodied everything that Jane Jacobs despised about urban planning, but his life and work have much to tell us about the mid-century city.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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Our second episode on Jane Jacobs' canonical work, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. In this second half we further discuss her vision for the ideal city, based on her experiences in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. We focus on her ideas around 'unslumming', her alternative model of gentle and community-led gentrification which offered an alternative to the mass-demolition of deprived neighbourhoods advocated by planners during this period. We talk about the ethics and politics of gentrification and Jane's blindspot for certain pernicious effects of market economics, and her proposals for economic health. We also discuss her approach to the car in the city, which will feel very familiar to anyone concerned with transportation and urbanism today. Subscribe to our Patreon for a bonus episode coming soon on Jane's campaigns against Robert Moses and the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

Our sponsor for this episode is Blue Crow Media, who produce gorgeous architectural maps of different cities, including Pyongyang, Tbilisi and New York. Use the offer code aboutbuildings for 10% off your next purchase!

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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The first episode in a two-part series on Jane Jacobs, a profoundly influential writer, thinker and campaigner on issues of urbanism, whose magnum opus 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' (1961) forms the backbone of our discussion. In it, Jacobs lays out an idealised vision of tight-knit, dense communities, inspired by her time living in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It is a vision of an interconnected, urban way of life dominated by local small-scale agents: families, independent businesses and community ties from which emerge vitality, security and comfort in densely populated streets of tenements with wide sidewalks and endless lines of sight across the bustling public spaces.

Jacobs' work was a rejection of many sacred cows of modernist planning, espoused by architects and bureaucrats alike: questions of density, scale, urban grain, transportation and space. Jacobs felt that their efforts rarely supported the vitality and energy she found so alluring in the tenements of Greenwich Village.

Subscribe to our Patreon for a discussion of one of the infrastructure projects Jacobs campaigned against: Robert Moses and the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

Also, we just reached 1 million listens on this feed! Thank you so much for all your support, we couldn't have done it without you. Remember to tell a friend, and give the show a review if you enjoyed it.

Our sponsor for this episode is Blue Crow Media, who produce gorgeous architectural maps of different cities, including Pyongyang, Tbilisi and New York. Use the offer code aboutbuildings for 10% off your next purchase!

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

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The final episode in our series on the deep history of the monastery. Modernity has arrived and monasticism is living a strange afterlife. First, we discuss the early 19th century Utopian Socialism of Charles Fourier, whose Phalanstère take the framework of the monastery and repurpose it to build community whose purpose is not the Opus Dei, but to ensure that all its members live fulfilling and happy lives. Next come the Constructivist communities of the early Soviet Union, where monastic communal living is weaponised as a tool to smash traditional bourgeois lifestyles and mould the next generation. Lastly we return to the the sunny hills of southern France, where Le Corbusier brought together his late-career love of sculptural concrete with the religious revival in postwar France to build the greatest monastery of the 20th century, La Tourette.

Our final episode of this series, on Romanticism and the Monastery, will be out on our Patreon feed next week.

Make sure you visit our instagram and view the pinned stories on 'Monasteries' for all the images from this series. Our next series on Jane Jacobs will begin next month.

Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts.

Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show.

Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us!

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We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.