About Buildings + Cities

In the first part of our new series on Piranesi we discussed his upbringing and background in Venice, his earliest travels to Rome and first work with Giuseppe Vasi and Tiepolo. We talked a little about the historical and cultural context of Piranesi’s work, before getting stuck into his Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743) and Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna (1745), and start to map out the rest of his oeuvre that will form the rest of the series. This is the first episode of a four part series about Piranesi, and there will be bonus episodes forthcoming on Patreon about his legacy and works of art and literature inspired by it. You can watch this episode on YouTube to follow along with the images: https://youtu.be/QUY4Yw2kxmk Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Mixing by Lewis Todd. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

To get full access to this episode, please consider supporting us on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/about_buildings Taking cues from the 'Show and Tell' main episode, Editor Matt joined us for a bonus and brought along a couple of interesting buildings to discuss. The first, Santa Maria del Naranco, in Asturia Northern Spain, was built as a summer palace for King Ramiros I in 842 CE. It is a surprising building in many ways, precociously Romanesque and highly resolved by 9th-century standards, its proportional logics give the building a profound presence, especially its end facades. We then discussed the sprawling, accretive mass of Frank Lloyd Wright's House and Studio in Oak Park, Chicago. This was his home and place of business from the late-1880s until the mid-1900s, and it grew substantially from modest gable-ended suburban cottage to hulking compound as his family and business grew. We also discussed the surrounding neighbourhood of Oak Park, which contains many idiosyncratic domestic designs from the pen of this erratic giant of American architecture. Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

This episode takes a new format! Instead of fitting into a larger series or a particular theme, Luke and George simply chose two interesting pieces of architecture each that they wanted to discuss and draw out particular ideas or themes from. Let us know if you liked this format, and we will consider doing more of them in between regular episodes! In this episode, we discussed the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, the Hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga, the Mausoleum of Theodoric at Ravenna and Lutyens' Mercantile Marine War Memorial at Tower Hill, London. You can follow along with images of the buildings dicussed on our Instagram feed or on YouTube: https://youtu.be/N9o4-pz4dM0 Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In our final episode of 2025, we discussed William Golding's 1964 novel 'The Spire', a deeply psychological portrayal of the construction of a cathedral spire in the 14th century, heavily influenced by Salisbury Cathedral. One of the great architectural novels, this episode contains extensive spoilers, so we recommend reading it or listening to the audiobook before you listen to this episode! Find this episode on YouTube to follow along with the images: https://youtu.be/Z2bjd950HOQ?si=yZ0nUn31nYVtLkvg Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In the finale of our series on Sigfried Giedion, we discussed the bait-and-switch coda of the book, where Giedion unexpectedly addresses questions of urbanism and town planning, via Haussmanisation, designs for Lyon by Tony Garnier, the Garden City movement, slab block modernism and Manhattan. Follow along with images on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1d8rDIt0mIw We hope you enjoyed this series. We will be back soon with a discussion of William Golding's 'The Spire'! Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

Some clips from our Patreon bonus episodes on Sigfried Gideion's 'Mechanisation Takes Command'. If you've enjoyed the show, please consider supporting us on Patreon for full access to these bonus episodes: https://www.patreon.com/c/about_buildings Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In part three of our discussion of 'Space, Time and Architecture', we finally got to the Spacetime and the architecture. We examined Giedion's thinking about many canonical works of the late-19th and 20th century, including the Chicago School, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright; the emergence of ferro-concrete in France with Perret and the bridges of Swiss engineer Robert Maillart and definitionally Modernist works by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto. To follow along with the images as we discuss them, you can find this episode on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/14OeGtn53CY?si=kU0FTyuYMuNUzgyI Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In the second part of our discussion of Sigfried Giedion's 'Space, Time and Architecture' we covered the canalpunk aesthetics of cast-iron bridges, the transformation of material technology in the 19th-century and the Chicago School, completing his teleological march up to modernism which we will discuss in the next episode. To follow along with the images, you can watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z2NCz-xl7V8 Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

In this first episode of a new series on Sigfried Giedion's 1941 book 'Space, Time and Architecture', we discussed the approach to architectural history and urbanism in the first part of this totemic publication which shaped modernist architectural culture. Giedion was a Jewish historian from a family of Swiss industrialists, born in Prague who studied under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. He was a founding member of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne or "CIAM" who left Europe for America in the 1930s like many other Jewish émigrés. The lectures he gave at Harvard in the late 1930s were published as 'Space, Time and Architecture', one of the most influential works of architectural history and theory of the 20th century. Watch this episode on YouTube for illustrations: https://youtu.be/89sjkU8G2bw Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

This is an unlocked Patreon bonus episode from our series on WG Sebald (episodes 77 & 78 in the main feed), if you enjoyed listening to this episode, please consider supporting the show on Patreon for access to our entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. In this final bonus episode from our series on WG Sebald, we discussed his two books 'The Rings of Saturn' (1995) and 'On the Natural History of Destruction' (1999). Both texts return to key themes of Sebald's writing: The Rings of Saturn is a melancholy walk across the low, flat plains of the East Anglian coast, where repressed memories of imperialist violence and mundane tragedy uncomfortably resurface alongside the banality of daily life. On the Natural History of Destruction is comprised of a series of essays reflecting on the memories of World War II in German literature, particularly the destruction of cities during the bombing campaigns in the final years of the war.  Our next series will be starting at the end of this Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We’re on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org This podcast is powered by Pinecast.