Architect: Peter Eisenman
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre
22 March 2021
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre22 March 2021
‘I think I understand, at least in principle.’ [1] Jacques Derrida tries to keep track of Peter Eisenman’s elaborate explanation. It is the 21st of April 1986, and in New Haven, Connecticut, philosopher and architect conduct the fifth of six meetings for their design of a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11 March 2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
Eisenman: House VI (1985)
21 May 2020
Eisenman: House VI (1985)21 May 2020
The design of House VI was partly the result of Eisenman’s attempt to reconcile linguistic theories with architectural design. His interest in the work of Noam Chomsky, especially his theories of syntax, led to the investigation of possible analogies between language and architecture, and particularly the syntactic aspects of architectural… Read More
Eisenman: House II
17 March 2017
Eisenman: House II17 March 2017
Drawing is a way of thinking. I can’t think or write ideas on a computer. I write and if you look at my desk, it’s full of paper. So to me drawing is a form of writing, and a form of reading what I write. I don’t see any difference.… Read More
Architecture and Geology
7 February 2017
Architecture and Geology7 February 2017
What is the relation between the forces that shape buildings and those that shape the earth’s surface? How are the imaginative powers of architects heightened by their knowledge of geological processes? How is their handling of all the cultural, economic and material constraints on their practice enriched by exposure to… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)
11 March 2016
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)11 March 2016
The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More
To Read A Drawing (1983)
12 February 2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12 February 2016
What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More
Simplification
6 May 2011
Simplification6 May 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29 April 2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29 April 2022
– Nicholas Olsberg
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
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