About Buildings + Cities
@about_buildings
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A podcast about architecture, history, literature, science fiction and ideas — @tlukejones , George Gingell & @matthewlloydr — links to subscribe below 👇👇
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Was the demolition of John Soane’s Bank of England the greatest single architectural loss in the history of London?
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La Sagrada Familia early on in its construction, when it was still on the edge of Barcelona’s grid
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Can’t stop thinking about the appendix projects of ‘Delirious New York’
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Donald Trump with his copy of Delirious New York and S,M,L,XL
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Louis Kahn eat your heart out; John Soane’s stable block for the Royal Hospital Chelsea, a rare survival of Soane’s most powerful bricky mode, discussed in our latest episode
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We often think of Palladian Villas as perfect, unitary designs. We see the woodcuts in his Quattro Libri and imagine the Veneto full of these perfect, polished buildings. The reality is that the Villas are often fragmentary, incomplete and stranger than that. 🧵 of our favourites
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A photograph of the Flatiron building in New York taken by Edward Steichen in 1904 - discussed in our latest episode on ‘Delirious New York’ by Rem Koolhaas
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NEW EPISODE ALERT! In the first of a 3-parter, we discussed Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Delirious New York’ (1978), his 'retroactive manifesto' for Manhattan. In this first part we discussed Rem's reputation, his style and his vision of the historical origins of the skyscraper 🌃🏢🗼🏬
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Some of the least well-known, but most enigmatic projects by John Soane were the court buildings he crammed in around the medieval Palace of Westminster, toplit rooms full of dramatic flair and spatial complexity sandwiched between the buttresses of Westminster Hall
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🚨ABC EPISODE 100: ANTONI GAUDÍ🚨 Today we began a new series on Gaudí, an idiosyncratic and visionary 19th-century architect, who is extremely famous, and quite uncool (among architects). In episode one we discussed his student days and early projects, including Casa Vicens
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We’re making TikToks now! Here’s a tour of Carlo Scarpa’s Olivetti Showroom, Venice:
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In 1916, New York City passed zoning laws which set rules for skyscrapers which were beginning to dominate the cityscape - in order to explain these new laws and encourage debate, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett commissioned illustrator Hugh Ferriss to visualise them
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The incredible play of light against parabolic arches in Antoni Gaudí’s Teresian College, Barcelona - a unique project where Gaudí was constrained by a pre-built ground floor plan, from his period of engagement with the Gothic tradition, the subject of our latest episode 🧵
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At Carlo Scarpa's Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, the tidal water of the canals is allowed into the envelope of the building, and negotiated through channels and raised walkways that allows water to pass through some parts of the gallery (🧵)
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Catch our latest tiktok, a guided tour of Fondazione Querini Stampalia, a palazzo in Venice transformed into a gallery by Carlo Scarpa in the 50s, including tidal gates which allow water into the gallery
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🚨NEW EPISODE ALERT🚨 We discussed ‘How Buildings Learn' (1994) by Stewart Brand. The book is concerned with the whole lifespan of buildings, and "What Happens After They're Built?"
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A couple of Soane interiors survive to this day in the heart of Whitehall!
@about_buildings
His old Privy Council courtroom still exists and I visited it on an Open House weekend in 1999, it's part of the Cabinet office complex. Sadly not possible to visit normally and no longer used for hearings. Beautiful space as I recall.
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On the north side of Piazza San Marco in Venice, behind a Renaissance arcade, sits Carlo Scarpa's Olivetti Showroom, an exquisitely detailed and precise intervention into the historic fabric that binds together luxury materials, high-end consumerism and a fractal design logic 🧵
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The first episode in our new series on the work of iconic architectural critic Ian Nairn is out now. We discussed his breakout work for the Architectural Review, Outrage, which railed against Subtopia, sprawl and the death of the gas lamp. Subscribe:
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Is this an office building or a shrine? It is both! John Soane’s National Debt Relief Office incorporated a toplit memorial to the politician William Pitt the Younger alongside a bureaucratic system to restore faith in government debt, a scheme which Pitt had proposed.
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🚨NEW EPISODE OUT NOW🚨 In part 2 of our series on ‘Delirious New York’ by Rem Koolhaas we discussed the New York Athletic Club and the Rockefeller Centre as particular iterations of his vision of ‘Manhattanism’
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Carlo Scarpa is best known for his cultural, institutional and cemetery architecture. Less well known, but equally stunning, were the commissions he completed for domestic projects, like these two Villas for the Veritti and Ottolenghi families
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Carlo Scarpa once said ‘I want a Pharaoh to pay me to build him a Pyramid’. He got his chance in 1968, when the family behind the Brionvega electronics company commissioned him to design a tomb complex in a small cemetery at Altivole in the Veneto. (🧵)
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If you want to spend some time with “Fun Rem”, check out our latest episode on Delirious New York:
honestly every time I revisit early Koolhaas I get kinda sad bc he used to be genuinely fun
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At Castelvecchio in Verona, Carlo Scarpa created an elaborate spatial narrative, weaving together historic structures and ingenious design elements to create a fragmentary and multi-layered story about the site, the city, and the objects contained in it. (🧵)
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Otto Wagner had a glass bathtub in his Vienna apartment, to which we can only say, dudes rock
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@VitruviusGrind
Gaudí columns and capitals made from naturally hexagonal basalt and conjoined with molten lead and general brick vault shenanigans at the Colonia Güell Church
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Was the demolition of John Soane’s Bank of England the greatest architectural crime of the 20th Century in London as Nikolaus Pevsner said?
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The final of our series of video tours of buildings by Carlo Scarpa, the Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, built 1959–73. Scarpa made his trademark intense and detailed interventions to draw out the complicated history of this medieval fortification in this middle of the city
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We're going to do another highly scientific polling tournament as part of our series on Palladio, this time trying to find the best Villa ever designed (by which we mean any private house in the countryside) — submit your favourites from any place, any period, any style below
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We've now finished our series on Carlo Scarpa. Our next series, on Andrea Palladio, will start in the new year. In the meantime, we thought we'd gather together all our threads on Scarpa below for anyone who missed them first time round. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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🚨NEW EPISODE🚨 First part of a new series on Otto Wagner, we're talking about the development of the city of Vienna in the 19th century, particularly the Ringstraße which transformed the 'glacis', a gap around the old city walls into the heart of a modern metropolis. 🧵 below
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A guided tour of Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, designed 1968–78 as a mausoleum complex for the Brion Vega family
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🚨New Episode!🚨 The first of a two-parter on Jane Jacobs, discussing 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities', an idealised vision of tight-knit, dense communities, inspired by her time living in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Archive photos below ↓
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The architecture of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona as captured by Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘The Passenger’ (1975) 🧵
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The Bank was built by John Soane who served as surveyor from 1788–1827. It was almost totally demolished from 1925–1933 by Herbert Baker, as Soane’s dramatic toplit spaces failed to provide adequate office space as the modern demands on the institution expanded
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Our latest episode is out now! In it we discussed ‘The Primitive Hut’, the vision of the first ever building which shaped architectural discourse in the 18th and 19th century, available wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube:
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Before the end of 2022 we will be publishing our 100th ever episode! It would be amazing if we could get 5k followers on Twitter before the end of the year. If you love the show, QT this with your favourite episode/series:
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We are lucky to have a wealth of paintings which depict the plans of the bank, its construction and its interiors, mostly by JM Gandy, Soane’s favourite painter to depict his work, and held in the collection of the
@SoaneMuseum
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Congratulations to
@SoaneMuseum
for winning our highly un-scientific Twitter poll of our favourite museum!! Thanks to everyone for suggesting museums, and for voting
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Book IV of Palladio's Quattro Libri features depictions of some of the greatest temples of classical antiquity, with pages of beautiful woodcuts cramming together elevations, detailed measured survey drawings and archaeological reconstructions. Here are some of our favourites 🧵
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Me: Mum can we get La Rotonda?
Mum: No, we have La Rotonda at home
La Rotonda at home:
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If you want to find out more about Carlo's domestic architecture, you can listen to a bonus episode about these houses, and access our whole back catalogue of bonus episodes, on our Patreon:
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What is this? It's not a control module from an art nouveau spaceship, but a Prie-dieu or prayer desk. Antoni Gaudí designed it alongside ornate interior decorations for Casa Batllo, channeling his weird fixation with swirling biomorphic forms and intricate craftmanship
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Villa Valmaran is a very early Palladio Villa, completed shortly after his visit to Rome in the 1540s. The plan is a huge square, with this vast pitched roof over it and a hay-loft round the back. The central bay of the facade is slightly depressed, only by a few inches.
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The first episode in our new series on Andrea Palladio is out now on podcast apps and YouTube! In it we discussed his upbringing, his early career as a stonemason, his discovery by Venetian aristocrats interested in humanism, and his earliest design projects 🧵
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In honour of our series on Carlo Scarpa, we’re running a (highly un-scientific) poll at the moment to find the best museum building in the world - follow this thread to vote for your favourite:
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We've just published an episode on Austerlitz by WG Sebald. It is a novel concerned with memory and architecture, telling the story of an arch. historian slowly recovering repressed childhood memories of fleeing Prague on the Kindertransport. Follow for photos from the novel 🧵
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We've just hit 1 million listens! Thank you so much to everyone for following the show and supporting us on Patreon, we couldn't have done it without you!
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Soane produced innumerable impractical and spectacular schemes for Westminster, form a triumphal arch for Downing Street to a complete rebuild of the Palace of Westminster — instead he achieved small fragmentary but brilliant interventions, now almost all lost
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A date for your diaries! At 5pm BST on 6th September we will be talking to
@evahagberg
about her new book ‘When Eero Met His Match’, a biography of architectural critic and publicist Aline Louchheim Saarinen, do join us!
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The first About Buildings in conversation — we talked to Fred Scharmen about Space Settlements in the 1970s.
Let us know what you think —
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🚨🚨 NEW EPISODE! 🚨🚨 we discussed Otto Wagner's work on the infrastructure of the city of Vienna. Follow this thread for pictures of the dams, railway stations and bridges that shaped Viennese modernity and provided the infrastructure for this rapidly growing city.
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The austerity and the starkness of the detailing reflects Palladio's incredible control of the purely geometric basis of Classicism, beyond mouldings and complex stonework. A Serliana, three portholes cut straight through the wall and a square window — gorgeous. (sorry bad pic)
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Why do Saudi Arabia’s plans for The Line and NEOM draw on the work of Soviet constructivist Ivan Leonidov and the Italian 60s avant-garde group Superstudio? We discussed this conundrum in our latest episode, available on Patreon
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A clip from our latest episode: some thoughts on Antoni Gaudí, his ‘uncool’ status amongst architects, super lush spatial fantasies and chicken sashimi
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His designs for the facade were rejected by parliamentary committee, which produced an unlovely and compromised design which drove Soane mad — and surely contributed to the eventual demolition of these remarkable spaces, now the site of a dingy lawn and statue of Oliver Cromwell
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Thanks so much to everyone for listening!! We hit 1.5 MILLION downloads this week! 🥳
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The surviving fabric — at a grand scale with its exposed brickwork and slightly under-considered detailing (the circular window in the pediment is surely scaled wrong) — feels more like a 19thC tram shed than a villa, but we still kind of love it.
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This tiny fragment of Palladio’s Villa Trissino, just 5 columns, was built for Ludovico and Francesco Trissino. The huge unbuilt plan in Quattro Libri was hugely influential on subsequent architects, despite never being completed.
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We also discussed Bodegas Güell, a complex of wineries and agricultural buildings in the countryside to the south of Barcelona. This project takes cyclopean masonry, a vast A-frame, gravity-defying stone pillars to create a building that calls back and forwards in time.
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Here you can see the pure application of these abstract geometric and spatial laws for new buildings, requiring setbacks to protect light rights, creating harsh and formally expressive forms, artfully made more architecturally ordered by Ferriss’s ‘delineations’ of 1922
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Our latest episode is out now! In it we discussed three large Barcelona projects by Antoni Gaudí: Casa Calvet, Battló and Milà. Oneiric roofscapes, HR Giger-esque biomorphic detailing, ornate craftsmanship and a rich culture of caricatures await. 🧵
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A tiny fragment of the Villa Thiene was built just outside of Vicenza, and it seems totally unrelated to the woodcut presented in Quattro Libri. You could just about read this block as one of the central pavilions with the Diocletian windows above it, but barely.
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Villa Serego is a very late work by Palladio, and it is quite unlike any of his other buildings. All that was built of the scheme was half of the inner courtyard, and where do you start with this??
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In 1797 the Scottish aristocratic geologist Sir James Hall wrote his ‘Essay on the Origins and Principles of Gothic Architecture’, which theorised the origins of gothic architecture in primitive wicker buildings
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Thread on public housing in Venice!!
Brief stroll around Vittorio Gregotti's Public Housing at San Giobe, Venice (1984-9). All very pleasant and rational, & a strong demonstration of the capacity of the tasteful pink-render-minecraft style of the late 80s to bridge between contradictory historical references.
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We're doing a tournament to find the best Villa ever designed! Here's the contenders in round 1, vote for your favourites in the thread of polls below:
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The fabulous facade of Frank Furness's lost Exchange House in Philadelphia, from Robert Venturi's 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture' (1966)
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If you are interested in finding out more about this great lost building, why not listen to the latest episode of our podcast, available (with images!) on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts:
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What did ‘The Primitive Hut’ mean to Le Corbusier? A flat-pack tent-temple which Bronze Age man could construct from the back of his chariot in perfect harmony with the universal geometries of the cosmos. Discussed it in our new Patreon episode, out now:
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Palladian Villas are some of the most iconic architectural designs ever produced. They are incredibly recognisable with their perfect proportions, innovative plans and iconic elevations. In our latest episode we talked about four ‘Greatest Villas’ — can you guess which ones? (🧵)
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🚨New Episode🚨 The first in our new series on monastic architecture from their origins to their after-live in the imagination of the 20th century. In this first episode we're discussing Romanesque sculpture, pilgrimage culture, and Cistercian asceticism. Follow thread for images
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Join us at 4pm BST on Wednesday 13 July on Instagram Live with
@pptamburelli
for a discussion of his new
@mitpress
book ‘On Bramante’!
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Paul Rudolph's unbuilt proposals for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, everything that Jane Jacobs despised about urban planning. We talked about this scheme and the career of Robert Moses in our latest Patreon episode. Listen now:
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Luke and George researching for the next episode in our series on Corb
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The curtain has now fallen on our series on Andrea Palladio! Thank you all so much for tuning in, we hope you enjoyed it. What subject would you like to see us tackle next?
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We talked about this building in a Patreon bonus episode for our Carlo Scarpa series!
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Tomorrow (Friday) at 1pm UK time we are going Live on Instagram with
@LHArtBooks
to talk to
@alicesangle
and John McKean about their new book about Walter Segal. Alice lives on Walters Way in South London and will be giving us a tour of the iconic self-built street!
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Listen to our series on ‘Delirious New York’ wherever you get your podcasts (or on YouTube!):
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Ferriss’s visions of Manhattan’s skyscrapers played a formative role in creating the dream of what the city would become, here with the acropolis atop Manhattan - this is the argument of Rem Koolhaas in his book ‘Delirious New York’, the subject of our latest episode!
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New episode! Discussing Otto Wagner's Landerbank in Vienna and the Rumbach Street Synagogue in Budapest, as well as debates about style and modernity in 19th century German architecture. Subscribe through the link in our bio. Follow 🧵 for images.
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🚨New episode alert ‼️🚨 Part 5 of our series on Antoni Gaudí, a discussion of later projects he carried out for the Eusebi Güell, including the world-renowned Park Güell in Barcelona, and the less well known Bodegas Güell and the recently restored Chalet of Catllaràs 🧵
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Who'd like to see us do an episode on the movies of Ari Aster? This Liechtenstein parliament building seemed eerily familiar
Liechtenstein (which I can now spell!) was a big winner with its striking modern parliament:
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As featured in Dune Part 2!
A guided tour of Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, designed 1968–78 as a mausoleum complex for the Brion Vega family
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Didn’t know it did that!!
Fondazione Querini Stampalia. Scarpa adjustable fountain spout mechanism. Central louder deposition of water vs perimeter quieter deposition of water.
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our Carlo Scarpa series will launch this week, with our first ever episode on video! Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don't miss it ->
Revisit to Carlo Scarpa’s exquisitely detailed, exuberantly over the top Tomba Brion, modernism at its most lux.
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If you want to find out more about Soane in Westminster, check out our latest podcast episode wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube:
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Our second episode on
#ChristopherAlexander
is out now! In the episode we discuss his most famous work, 'A Pattern Language' and his idiosyncratic built work — listen to the episode now and if you enjoy the show, give us a review in your podcast app
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Editor Matt has co-hosted a podcast for
@TheSAHGB
about Architecture and Protest, from Chartists to Cable Street to BLM, you can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts by searching 'Architectural History', links are here:
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A reminder to join us at 5pm BST today (12 Eastern) on Instagram Live for a conversation with
@evahagberg
about her
@PrincetonUPress
book 'When Eero Met His Match', an exploration of the life and work of Aline B. Loucheim Saarinen!
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Very excited to be the number one visual arts podcast in the UK this week
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Is there a house with a better name than John Soane’s Moggerhanger Park?
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Our episode on Renaudie is free to listen wherever you get your podcasts:
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Classical architecture came to Britain later than any other country in Europe, and the celebrated first 'true' classical architect in England was Inigo Jones, designer of court masques and classical buildings for James VI/I and Charles I, strongly influenced by Andrea Palladio 🧵
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If you want to hear more about Gordon Cullen's work, listen to our latest bonus episode in our series on Ian Nairn! Subscribe now:
Townscape
Gordon Cullen
Architectural Press, 1961
GC wasn’t a fan of new towns, thinking they suffered from ‘prairie planning’, too much space and not enough urban feeling.
“A victim of prairie planning traces out his public protest, a reminder of a properly concentrated town”.
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The second episode in our series on Ian Nairn is out now! In it we discussed the joy of Nairn's London, his sprawling 1966 guide to the capital, filled with idiosyncratic descriptions of carefully curated buildings in purple prose. Listen now:
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