Architect: Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine
In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář
4 October 2022
In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář4 October 2022
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. In The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel likens a library to a human brain and… Read More
Archives, or Ardor
26 October 2017
Archives, or Ardor26 October 2017
Butter, fire, ardor: Roberto Calasso tells us that Vedic India is one of the earliest civilisations and one about which the least is known, having left nothing behind but a few fragments of enigmatic texts about worship and sacrifice. No buildings, no palaces, no traces of temples. Just the simple instructions… Read More
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room
4 October 2016
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room4 October 2016
A fresh alternative to the intellectual and formal mannerisms associated with architectural drawings in the West since the age of Leon Battista Alberti, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine’s drawing explores a simple, direct way of communicating a spatial proposition. To access his vision we don’t need to be familiar with the conventions of… Read More
Fontaine: Market Stalls
1 August 2016
Fontaine: Market Stalls1 August 2016
The following text is an excerpt from a conference paper given by Basile Baudez as part of the Rencontres du Centre André Chastel, Paris, May 2016. The ‘History of Colour in Architectural Drawing, 16th–19th Centuries’ is part of a forthcoming book. Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing… Read More
The changing metropolis 1815–1900
27 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1815–190027 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More
Architectural anxiety
28 September 2011
Architectural anxiety28 September 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
– Iris Moon
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
Extracts: Women Writing Architecture DMC plan presentation domestic