US Modernist Radio - Architecture You Love
Join host George Smart as the USModernist Radio crew talks and laughs with people who enjoy, own, create, dream about, preserve, love, and hate Modernist architecture, the most exciting and controversial buildings in the world.
Rank #1: #95/Phillip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House: Author Mark Lamster.
Architect Philip Johnson’s father invested 100 years ago in ALCOA, the huge aluminum company, which Johnson a millionaire in his '20s. Before he became an architect, however, Johnson organized a landmark exhibition on International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 which introduced important Modernist architects as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. He went on to get formal education in design but by then his reputation as a kingmaker of architects was firmly established. He is regarded as one of the first architects to achieve celebrity status, as much for his design evangelism and connections than for his buildings. He died in 2005 at the age of 98. Today host George Smart with co-host Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell welcome Mark Lamster, an award-winning architectural critic of the Dallas Morning News and a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington. For nearly a decade, Lamster studied Johnson’s correspondence, archives, and even his FBI file for a new biography titled The Man in the Glass House. He has been a contributing editor to Architectural Review, Design Observer, ID, Architect, Architectural Record, Metropolis, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Rank #2: #53/Richard Neutra: Raymond Neutra + Barbara Lamprecht.
Richard Neutra was one of the world’s most important architects, and today his work is even more popular. Neutra designed more than 300 amazing Modernist houses in California and elsewhere. In 1949, Time Magazine featured Neutra on its cover and ranked him second only to Frank Lloyd Wright in American architecture. Neutra hired several architects who went on to independent success, including Gregory Ain, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Raphael Soriano. Our first guest is Neutra’s son and a good friend of the podcast, Raymond Neutra, who has been traveling the world photographing his father’s houses. He is author of Cheap and Thin: Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright. Joining Raymond is Barbara Lamprecht, one of the world’s foremost experts on Richard Neutra’s architecture. If you’ve been in any Modernist house worth talking about, you’ve seen one of her Neutra books on the Noguchi or Nelson coffee table. She is an architect and architectural historian and a kind of forensic examiner, performing environmental reviews, and applying for the National Register of Historic Places, National Historic Landmarks, and Mills Act programs. She specializes in Modernism and has appeared in the documentaries GlobeTrekker, Visual Acoustics, and Coast Modern.
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