Architect: Adolfo Natalini
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic
13 January 2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13 January 2021
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31 August 2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31 August 2020
By Julian Lewis
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25 March 2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25 March 2020
By Peter Blake
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
Alternative Histories: Eagles of Architecture on Adolfo Natalini
29 July 2019
Alternative Histories: Eagles of Architecture on Adolfo Natalini29 July 2019
Hope as an attitude.Hope in the merging of two conflictual realities.Hope when considering the multiplicity of realms around which the encounter revolves. The paradigm which lays at the heart of the SUPERSTUDIO sketch raises a series of urgencies, doubts, eventualities.The model aims at intensifying these. In the model, a shift… Read More
Alternative Histories: OMMX on Adolfo Natalini
27 July 2019
Alternative Histories: OMMX on Adolfo Natalini27 July 2019
Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio
12 January 2019
Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio12 January 2019
We received a sketch made by Superstudio, the Italian architecture firm renowned for its conceptual architecture works.In the famous 1966 exhibition ‘Super Architecture’ the squared grid is used in a variety of scales from the simplest objects of furniture, such as a table, to an urban landscape.Through a series of… Read More
Superstudio: in Yesterday’s Tomorrow
23 December 2018
Superstudio: in Yesterday’s Tomorrow23 December 2018
‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell
9 October 2018
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell9 October 2018
To provoke an archaeology of collage making Niall Hobhouse asked Adolfo Natalini and Gian Piero Frassinelli to prepare a last collage, some 50 years after the first Continuous Monument, to imagine that it had finally arrived at Shatwell.
Tree Speech
7 November 2020
Tree Speech7 November 2020
By Sylvia Lavin
The following text is the fourth of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More
competition landscape urban form nature