About Buildings + Cities

In 1922, to coincide with its 75th birthday, the Chicago Tribune set out to endow the city with ‘the world’s most beautiful office building’. The results of the design competition have been seen in retrospect less as ‘the ultimate in civic expression’ than as an expression of aesthetic and theoretical crisis within architecture. Hugely varied, bizarre, ingenious and occasionally grotesque, the entries provide a window into a discipline in transformation, as well as into the politics of a new American metropolis.

Apologies for some slight issues with the sound.

A book showing all the competition entries has been uploaded to Monoskop — if you download it you will be able to see what we’re talking about…

We discuss the entries by John Mead Howells & Raymond Hood (plate 1)

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Leaving the waste-strewn Earth behind, we follow the team on their run all the way to its conclusion in orbit. On the way, we cast our eyes over the weed-smelling shanty-hulk of Zion, the sunlit Condé Naste-styled resort-perfection of Freeside, and the gloomy, Victorian-styled warren of the Villa Straylight. Fewer mattresses, more carpets.

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We’re back in dystopia, soaking up the glamour, danger and decadence of the cyberpunk city. We’re reading William Gibson’s seminal science fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), which combines the pace of a thriller with a vivid and almost archaeological view of the technological and material fabric of the near future city – glue, chipboard, broken TVs, epoxy resin, dirty water, and a strange profusion of foam mattresses. Gibson has spoken about the city as a ‘compost heap’ – and we’re sifting through it alongside Case, Molly, Armitage, the AI Wintermute, and the rest of the misfit expedition – and considering Noir, technology, desire, fear of the suburbs, and the vast consensual hallucination you’re plugged into right now.

Some topics –

Music from Chris Zabriskie 'Cylinder Seven’ from the album ‘Cylinders’

Outro music is from the Neuromancer computer game (1988)

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During the 1960s and 70s, the French architect Jean Renaudie designed and built a series of projects in which he attempted to upend the staid and formulaic model of postwar slab-block mass housing. Architecture, for Renaudie, had to acknowledge and enshrine human being's 'Right to Difference'.

But this didn't mean discarding the achievements or social ideology of modernism – rather, as part of a wider European project of dissent, critique and reformation, he formulated his own daring formal solution to the problem of uniting the needs and image of the individual with those of the collective.

And how did he do it? Well, for a start, the rooms are mostly triangular…

We discussed –

The Projects

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We've posted some pictures on our twitter and instagram feeds – addresses for these at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

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A fuzzy empire of blur, a low grade purgatory, a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends…

We're discussing Junkspace (2001), Rem Koolhaas's notoriously elliptical wander through the dystopian and formless morass of early 21st retail architecture that seems gradually to be devouring the city, and the world.

In keeping with the essay, the episode is radically unstructured, only barely makes sense, and is held together largely by hyperbole.

We discussed –

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Michelangelo’s incredibly long career meant that he was old for a very long time, and the idea of death, and of what comes afterwards, hang over many of the projects he worked on late in life. We discuss his pivotal role in the design of St Peter’s in Rome, the sombre and terrible ‘Last Judgement’ in the Sistene Chapel, and a series of fragmentary late drawings, designs and sculptures which seem to be pointing to the future and the past at the same time.

It’s been about four hours of solid Michelangelo now, and it’s time to send him (and the other cast of characters) into the tender arms of our Lord & Saviour. It'll be back to late Capitalism next time.

Please let us know what you think – tweet us @about_buildings or email [email protected] – you can also find links to subscribe to the podcast, and all our social media profiles at our website – aboutbuildingsandcities.org

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We continue our discussion of the architecture of Michelangelo Buonarotti with an exploration of two of his most important projects – the Laurentine Library, in which his sculptural understanding of form and mass is most powerful and disconcerting – and the Piazza del Campidoglio, an urban ensemble which would become a definitive reference for the idea of civic space.

In between George extemporises for about 20 minutes on late medieval Italian history despite having done no research, and we dip into the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.

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The first of a three-parter in which we try to understand the work, and myth, of Michelangelo Buonarroti, referred to by followers as ‘the Divine’, and genuinely described by his biographer as a messenger sent from God to stop people from doing bad art.

It’s a long recording and we may have spent a bit too long talking about the ‘New Sacristy’ in Florence. But the 15 minute, rhapsodic description of David’s perfect body?

We regret it Not At All.

Some slightly excessive chat about a particular part of David's body but otherwise extremely wholesome.

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Outro:

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The second part of your discussion of Ayn Rand's extremely long fantasy about the 'ideal man' and the buildings he makes. The book gets weirder and more political as it goes on, and we meet Rand's Mary-Sue character, the long-suffering helmet-haired ice princess Dominique Francon.

All these things make the book worse.

Features music by Chris Zabriskie –

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