About Buildings + Cities

About Buildings + Cities is a long-form architecture conversation with room for uncertainty, correction, and the odd dry aside. It is serious about buildings. It is also serious about the books, drawings, clients, myths, and accidents that gather around them. Recent episodes move from Gian Battista Piranesi’s prisons, prints, church work, antique sculpture trade, and decorative designs to early medieval survivals such as Santa Maria del Naranco. The show often begins with a concrete object and then follows the pressure lines outward. A palace in Barcelona becomes a way into Gaudí, luxury, industrial money, and Count Güell’s self-image. A Beaux-Arts manual becomes a window onto design pedagogy, rendering, compositional rules, urns, gardens, and the peculiar abstraction of plan-making. William Golding’s The Spire lets the conversation pass between cathedral structure, medieval knowledge, religious ecstasy, sacrifice, and literary problems. The show is not confined to architecture in the narrow sense. Philip K. Dick’s Ubik appears through paranoia, gnosticism, and the wider canon the speakers have built over time. Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture leads into London, Paris, Amsterdam, town planning, and the tension between heroic figures and anonymous historical forces. The format is conversational, but the conversations often stretch into sustained analysis. One speaker may carry a long descriptive passage while another prompts, agrees, questions, or sharpens the point. That rhythm matters. It lets the show feel less like a lecture than a shared act of reconstruction. Buildings are described as sequences: outside to inside, image to structure, relic to chapel, plan to rendering, historical claim to awkward exception. The show is especially strong when it admits that a building or text is inscrutable, then keeps looking anyway. Its jokes puncture grandeur without dismissing the subject. Its digressions usually find their way back to the object. For listeners interested in architectural theory, urban history, design culture, and the strange afterlives of buildings in fiction and print, it offers a dense but companionable way to think.