Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Futu...

In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label…it was an internet company: America Online. The AOL Disc was a marketing coup—hugely successful. It’s not an overstatement to say that it’s ... Show More

Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch. That someone was L. L. Z ... Show More

In 1932, the Women's House of Detention—New York City's first women's prison—opened in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was opened to make "wayward" women quiet, private, and properly feminine. And the building had one unique feature originally meant to be a sort of kindness—a ... Show More

The first of a two part episode exploring Le Corbusier’s infamous and much-derided urban proposals, exhibited in the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion in 1925. In this part, we’re conducting a close reading of ‘Urbanism’ (sometimes known as ‘The City of Tomorrow and its Planning’). We most ... Show More

Cities are locations which take up and outsized space in our imaginations. They are places that ambitious and creative young people aspire to go to in order to succeed and find their place in the world. Perceptions about cities in the wake of the pandemic have changed. The forec ... Show More

In this episode we explore in two early schemes for mass housing, at Pessac and in Stuttgart. Among many other things, we talked about — Bourneville New Lanark - Arnold circus - Bruno taut’s horseshoe estate - Pessac - Henri Frugès - The Weissenhofseidlung - Margarete Schutte-Lih ... Show More

Every week a million more people move to live in cities. Can they cope with this constant expansion? Aleks explores whether 'Smart' cities are the answer or do they come with a hidden price of personal freedom. She visits the world's "smartest" city, Masdar in Abu Dhabi and explo ... Show More

We now have a Patreon — you can subscribe to get additional content for every episode. Projects like the Villa Stein and Villa Savoye are icons of modernist architecture — among the most famous of all modern buildings — images and symbols of what modern architecture is. Below all ... Show More

In 1960, Brazil opened a new capital city in its remote central plains.The city was designed by modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer and was supposed to symbolise Brazil's future ambitions. In 2014, Claire Bowes spoke to Osorio Machado, an engineer who worked on the city's construc ... Show More

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 ... Show More

Once society became convinced that you could build skyscrapers without them immediately collapsing, cities across the United States -- and, soon the world -- scrambled to build their own structures. In part two of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore the continuing rac ... Show More

The natural world evokes various feelings in the mind, but humans spend a great deal of their time within spaces that they themselves designed and built out of the environment. In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe consider the ways that architecture impacts ... Show More