USModernist Radio — Modernist Architecture Podcast
USModernist® Radio is underwritten by The Brent R. Harris Charitable Trust, restorer of several Modernist houses including Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs, the E. Fay Jones Conservancy, preserving Jones properties in northwest Arkansas, and by Diane Bald and The Budman Family, restoring significant architecture in Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu and Palm Springs.
Listen to one of America's top-rated architecture podcasts as the USModernist® Radio crew talks and laughs with fascinating people who own, create, love, and hate Modernist architecture, the most controversial houses and buildings in the world. DWELL rated USModernist Radio as the #2 architecture podcast, with Atomic Ranch putting us at #1!
Here are all our past shows! Or listen to them straight from our library.
Past architecture guests Jeanne Gang, Bjarke Ingels, Daniel Libeskind, Helena Arahuete, Barbara Bestor, Moshe Safdie, Tom Kundig, Harry Bates, Peter Bohlin, Alan Hess, Peter Gluck, Robert Rubin, Blair Kamin, Barry Bergdoll, Myron Goldfinger, Kenneth Frampton, Katie Swenson, Bob Ivy, Jen Masengarb, Angie Brooks + Larry Scarpa, Gisue Hariri, Sekou Cooke, Alexandra Lange, Paul Goldberger, Inga Saffron, Jim Olson, Sarah Susanka, Raymond and Dion Neutra, Eric and Susan Saarinen, and many more.
Past musical guests Pink Martini, Ari Shapiro, China Forbes, Madeleine Peyroux, Judy Carmichael, Toni Tennille, Stacey Kent, Jane Monheit, Nnenna Freelon, Diane Schuur, Noel Paul Stookey, Brenda Lee, Jennifer Warnes, Ann Hampton Callaway, Lucy Wijnands, Monika Ryan, Lenore Raphael and Howard Alden, Eliane Elias, Halie Loren, Marilyn Scott, Cheryl Bentyne, Janis Siegel, Storm Large, Kate Earl, Darius Brubeck, Maria Muldaur, Claire Martin, Robin McKelle, Bria Skonberg, Sophie Milman, Lucy Woodward, Heather Rigdon, Tierney Sutton, Diana Panton, Don Most, Linda Eder, and Peter Lamb and the Wolves.
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Presented By
Host and Executive Producer
Announcer, co‑host, and engineerGeorge Smart, one dark and stormy night in 2007, started what has become USModernist®, the largest open digital nonprofit educational archive for Modernist residential design in the world. George and his intrepid team of wildly dedicated volunteers and woefully underpaid staff have won 20 local, state, and national awards. He appears in the architecture documentaries Frey II and New England Modernism by acclaimed filmmaker Jake Gorst.
Tom Guild, legendary Raleigh FM DJ, grew up in a Durham Modernist house. He was on WRDU and WQDR back when humans actually played vinyl records over the airwaves using something called radio. Over the years, Tom recorded and mixed hours of top-notch audio including Porsche By Design for the NC Museum of Art. He met Mick Jagger. He has not met Frank Gehry. The security code for the show's recording studio, SoundTrax, is 8675309. The podcast began in 2015, based in Raleigh NC, and has done remotes from Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Sarasota, London, New York, and New Canaan CT.
Reboot: Beatriz Colomina + Sandra Costa
Princeton architectural historian Beatriz Colomina on how Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine popularized Modernist furniture to America, plus Playboy bunny-turned-designer Sandra Costa, who creates bachelor pads all over the world.
Gunny Harboe + Isabel Strauss + Vin Cipolla + Mark Römisch + Musical Guest Rosie Webber
Gunny Harboe is the architect behind decades of Frank Lloyd Wright restorations. Then, the winner of one of the smallest architecture competitions ever, the Bauhaus Bathroom, Isabel Strauss, with Historic New England’s CEO Vin Cipolla. Mark Römisch shares his years documenting New England’s hidden Bauhaus houses. And closing us out, Rosie Webber, the viral vocalist and impressionist turned cabaret headliner.
Vishaan Chakrabarti + Christiano Sampaio + Musical Guest Carmen Bradford
Vishaan Chakrabarti is the architect leading the $7 billion redesign of Penn Station. Christiano Sampaio is the Los Angeles broker who built a boutique brokerage around lofts, but we’re talking to him about a different kind of property: houses in movies. And closing us out, Carmen Bradford, the jazz vocalist who talked her way into Count Basie’s band, and still plays with them today.
John Boccardo + Derek Esplin + Christine Madrid French + Mark Lamster + Eyal Einik + Musical Guest Monika Ryan
Most architecture fans love the Hitchcock film North By Northwest. Guests John Boccardo, Derek Esplin, and Christine Madrid French turned Hitchcock’s fictional Vandamm House into a $45 million Modernist marvel in Utah. Mark Lamster, the newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner works to save Dallas City Hall from demolition. Eyal Einik is an architect-turned-developer transforming one of those Holiday Inn corncob buildings of the 1960’s into a new Hotel Indigo. Later on, returning musical guest Monika Ryan.
Jim Stevens + Max Strang + Philip Kennicott + Musical Guest Rick Maltese
Jim Stevens is the brand new dean of the University of Arkansas’s Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design and we caught him on Day 1. Max Strang in Florida talks about his latest house. Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post, talks about music, mourning, ballrooms, and Bach. Later on, musical guest Rick Maltese.
Dimitry Vergun + Don Singer + Concordia Seminary with Robert Roethemeyer and Paul Prange + Musical Guest Jen Ash
Dimitry Vergun, who passed away last month, was an architect, earthquake expert, and structural engineer behind some of California’s most audacious houses. Architect Don Singer, one of the last living midcentury Modernists in Florida has a huge legacy of houses you can see on USModernist. Then we discover Eero Saarinen’s remarkable Lutheran Concordia seminary in Fort Wayne IN with Robert Roethemeyer and Paul Prange. Later, returning musical guest Jen Ash.