Podcast — Episode 26
Environment and Psychology in Architecture and Urbanism: A Conversation with Volker M. Welter
Our guest on this episode is Volker M. Welter, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In Part 1:
Discovering the work of urban planner Patrick Geddes: community, civic responsibility and civic society (2:30) — The origins of town planning in the late 19th century: architecture, economics and biology (5:00) — The urban environment of Edinburgh today: from the Old Town to the Outlook Tower (9:15) — Visualizing the topography of Edinburgh in the Outlook Tower (14:15) — Geddes’s 1925 plan for Tel Aviv, Chaim Weizmann and Israel Zangwill (16:44) — Connecting Tel Aviv to historic Jaffa (21:30) — In the 1930s, Jewish refugees and the Bauhaus arrive in Tel Aviv (24:00)
In Part 2:
Along with practical functions, the need for cultural or spiritual elements in town planning: Geddes’ “cultural acropolis” (1:45) — The cosmic and religious symbolism of Geddes’s unbuilt plan for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus (4:45) — Vitalism and spiritualism in Geddes’s town planning work in India and Pakistan (6:45) — Town planning after 1945 and the collapse of fascism: reassessing modernism (10:00) — Discovering the architecture of Ernst L. Freud — the architect to the Weimar bourgeoisie builds a country house outside Berlin (15:00) — Beyond the “communist / reactionary” dichotomy in the history of Weimar architecture (19:25) — Freud’s bourgeois villas: an alternative to the völkisch and radical tendencies between the wars (24:45) — Capitalist vs. socialist architecture; designing the first office spaces for psychoanalytic therapy (29:00)
In Part 3:
Vernacular architecture in California: the Case Study Houses (2:00) — the Tremaine houses and family patronage of domestic architecture in midcentury America (4:30) — how the Tremaine family worked with different modern architects (9:45) — Burton G. Tremaine, Emily Hall Tremaine, and modernism (13:30) — Walter S. White and midcentury modern architecture in Santa Barbara (19:30) — Aspirational modernism: small houses in Palm Desert (22:30) — Walter S. White at the Kissing Camels Estate in Colorado (27:30)
Volker M. Welter’s visit to UT Dallas was made possible by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History.
The Athenaeum Review podcast is produced by Creative Disturbance.