Architect: Le Corbusier
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23 April 2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23 April 2020
By Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’
28 February 2020
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’28 February 2020
By Robin Evans
– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22 August 2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22 August 2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
Alternative Histories: Florian Beigel Architects on Le Corbusier
21 March 2019
Alternative Histories: Florian Beigel Architects on Le Corbusier21 March 2019
When asked to participate in ‘Alternative Histories’, I was pleased to be offered the large, elegant drawing by Le Corbusier of his proposal for the Bhakra Dam near Chandigarh, India. I remember seeing this drawing with Florian Beigel years ago in the Drawing Matter archive, and again in an important… Read More
Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier
12 January 2019
Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier12 January 2019
A Rain of Light It is our true belief that light is particles of dust. When light is driven through impurities it intensifies, and we assign it a mineral quality. We feel empowered by the ‘photon theory of light’ by Albert Einstein. – Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, January 2019
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India
7 September 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India7 September 2018
Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More
Le Corbusier’s Unité
1 August 2016
Le Corbusier’s Unité1 August 2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
The hatred of rendering
1 August 2015
The hatred of rendering1 August 2015
By Le Corbusier
The following has been extracted from a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1930. I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is… Read More
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s
29 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s29 November 2013
By Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
Displaced persons
3 October 2012
Displaced persons3 October 2012
By Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Architects are extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate into their visual descriptions of buildings any evidence that the real subject their structures serve, and around whose activities they are so carefully formulated, is people. Here’s a look at a few of the moments when this unspoken rule has been broken. DISTANCES: Using… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28 July 2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28 July 2020
By Stan Allen and José Oubrerie
‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More
sketch projection (axonometric isometric) topographic/cartographic landscape religion