52 min listen
S4E26: New Meant Better with Jonathan Meades
S4E26: New Meant Better with Jonathan Meades
ratings:
Length:
69 minutes
Released:
Mar 7, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Colin Marshall sits down in Marseille, France, specifically in the Le Corbusier-designed Unité d'Habitation, with Jonathan Meades, writer and broadcaster on architecture, culture, food, and a variety of other subjects to do with place. In his latest film, Bunkers, Brutalism, and Bloodymindness, he looks at architectural styles once- and currently maligned. They discuss how much his residence in Marseilles has to do with his residence in the Unité d'Habitation, to which "caprice" brought him not long ago; unapologetic building versus pusillanimous building; the lack of centralized planning that afflicts France, and what kind of built environment it has brought about; what makes Marseille "no longer the city of Gene Hackman and Fernando Rey"; the phases of the Unité, from its rejection by the workers for whom Corbusier intended it onward; the larger reaction to 20th-century social housing in France and Britain, and what it means that those countries have no taste for the sublime; which European borders he crosses and most immediately notices that "someone cares" about the buildings; what you miss by never having seen Portsmouth's Tricorn Centre, which rose in a rebuilt city in a time when "new meant better"; how he finds no place boring, an attitude for which he may have received inadvertent training traveling through England with his salesman father; places as gardens of forking paths, leading to all manner of other things; real places, and the fiction places you by definition invent when you try to describe them; the "persona completely apart" he uses to contrast against the variety of places on display in his films; his ideal of satirizing everything; what went into his upcoming book An Encyclopedia of Myself, beginning with the "lie" of its title; whether he has ever felt fascinated by American places; what the French consider too "difficult" about his un-methodical work; and what hope we should hold out for a future Jonathan Meades film on Buenos Aires.
Released:
Mar 7, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Deep historian Daniel Lord Smail: A conversation about bridging the gap between history and prehistory with Daniel Lord Smail, professor of history at Harvard University and author of On Deep History and the Brain. by Notebook on Cities and Culture