A screen capture from television station CGTN’s website, showing a fascinating radio/cassette player-shaped building in Shenyang, China. A sense of the building’s size can be gained by looking at the automobiles, parked at the structure’s bottom-center.
RADIO AS ARCHITECTURE: BUILDINGS AS SYMBOLS AND SHAPES
There are buildings which are shaped like anything but buildings—the most famous probably being a duck-shaped one (used by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour to make a point “Leaning From Las Vegas”.)
A spread from Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s book “Learning from Las Vegas” — wherein the architectural world was introduced to the Long Island Duck—both as a building and as a category within the authors’ architectural/urbanism theories.
And there are buildings shaped like a basket, a guitar, a fish, a dragon, a flying saucer, a hot dog, a teapot, a donut, a shoe box — and a shoe! When we were thinking about architecture and radio, we sought in vain for a suitable built example—until we found the above colorful example. Built in Shenyang, China, it’s vividly colorful—but whether the audiotronic imagery is symbolic is unknown: Is this exterior treatment for a building which houses a radio station or a music producer?—we’d like to know!
ARCHITECTURE ON THE RADIO
The above building aside—Architecture and Radio seem like an unlikely pairing:
How could something so inherently visual as architecture be captured and conveyed in the domain of sound? Other disparate mediums don’t seem to have stopped radio producers over the years, as we’ve heard fine radio shows devoted to other primarily visual subjects: shows on movies, painting & sculpture, and even comic books.
You can see the full selection of their radio shows at: https://www.usmodernist.org/usmodernistradio.htm
Fearless as always, George Smart and his team at USModernist have ventured into the world of audio, a project they call US Modernist Radio. Indeed, they’ve been doing so for several years, and they’ve brought historically meaningful results: interviews with some of the most fascinating (and influential) figures on the architecture & design scene.
People like:
Moshe Safdie, Paul Goldberger, Larry Scarpa, Kate Wagner, Sam Lubell, Lord Peter Palumbo, Eric Lloyd Wright, Carl Abbott, FAIA, Cole Akers, Eames Demetrios, Raymond and Dion Neutra, Dirk Lohan, Alexandra Lange, Nathanial Kahn, Kelsey Keith, Alan Hess, Justin Shubow, Erica Stoller, James Stevens Curl, Mark Lamster, Chris Grimley, Natascha Drabbe—and many more.
US Modernist Radio’s listing/episode number for their 2015 show with Ernst Wagner. In this photo, accompanying their on-line listing, Paul Rudolph is show on the right, and Wagner on the left.
Even more important to us is that one of their interviewees was Ernst Wagner—a long-time friend and business partner of Paul Rudolph (as well as founding board member of the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation.) George Smart spoke with him in 2015. and that show—along with all of the others they’ve produced, are available for listening.
You can see the full listing of US Modernist’s Radio shows here — including the one with Ernst Wagner.
Their shows are listenable via a variety of platforms:
And there are further ways to hear US Modernist’s radio shows:
For example, their show with Ernst Wagner can be heard on Youtube, here.