Top 5 Podcasts | NoCA Shelter In Place Recommendations
Like us, maybe you have already binge-watched the latest season of your favorite TV show and are looking for some new activities while sheltering in place! Here is a list of our top five podcasts on architecture, urban design, and Modernism.
99 Percent Invisible
Okay, maybe you have heard of this one. It has long been a favorite with design nerds of all stripes. From the show’s website: “99% Invisible is about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world.” Recent (topical) topics include the history of toilet paper!
Notable Episode: “It’s Chinatown”
In particular, we highly recommend 99% Invisible Episode 319, “It’s Chinatown,” which discusses San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood and architecture.
USModernist Radio
Fun and funny but always informative! USModernist Radio is an interview-based podcast that features guests such as architects, children of famous architects, curators, historians, and critics. Plus—USModernist has a great free, online library of old architecture publications with downloadable high-resolution PDFs.
Design and Architecture (KCRW)
From KCRW “Host Frances Anderton looks at design and architecture from a Los Angeles perspective.” Although based in and often focused on Los Angeles, many of the topics are much broader.
Podcast Episode: “Kitchen Sisters Present: San Francisco - Stories from the Model City” from SFMOMA Raw Material
This episode of SFMOMA’s podcast Raw Material was produced by the Kitchen Sisters and focuses on a massive approximately 40’ by 40’ scale model of the city of San Francisco, and uses the exhibition of the model at the San Francisco Public Library branches in 2019 as a means of exploring personal stories from various neighborhoods throughout the city. From the Kitchen Sisters:
“In the late 1930s, during the depths of the Depression, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of San Francisco—a WPA project conceived as a way of putting artists to work and as a planning tool for the City to imagine its future.”
About Buildings + Cities
This podcast is incredibly informative and often hilarious. Described by creators Luke Jones and George Gingell as “A podcast about architecture, buildings and cities, from the distant past to the present day. Plus detours into technology, film, fiction, comics, drawings, and the dimly imagined future.” The creators are British, so this podcast is a bit more Euro-centric, but is a fantastic continuing education on architecture and urbanism. All the episodes are great, but we highly recommend the ones about the Barbican Estate, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jean Renaudie…oh and the vicious and hilarious take-down of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
