Architect: Peter Smithson
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality
24 February 2023
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality24 February 2023
Alison and Peter Smithson often introduced figures that were protagonists in the news, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, French actor Gérard Philipe, and the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru into their architectural drawings for social housing projects—as in the case of their collages for the… Read More
Hexenhaus (2021) – Review
27 June 2022
Hexenhaus (2021) – Review27 June 2022
‘THE FOREST THAT BUILT THE HOUSE’ There are two drawings for me that are significant in understanding the work of the Smithsons. Both are of Upper Lawn [1]. One is a drawing made by Peter Smithson of their Solar Pavilion in elevation, the other by Alison Smithson in plan. The… Read More
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt
14 June 2021
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt14 June 2021
Review The compelling question of reality, or rather its representation as realism presented as an aesthetic category, acts as the organising principle of this interesting book. This is an investigation of the relationship between photography, architecture and the problem of realism, as its subtitle explains. Its author, Jesús Vassallo, immediately… Read More
Peter Smithson: Obelisk
12 October 2017
Peter Smithson: Obelisk12 October 2017
Peter Smithson’s influence predates slightly that of Cedric Price. It has also migrated to Shatwell, most notably in the recent re-erection of his wooden obelisk that first stood at Hadspen, commanding the view across the countryside. At Shatwell the obelisk takes on a more urban role (the design was originally… Read More
Jessie Brennan
4 January 2017
Jessie Brennan4 January 2017
An image These drawings are an act of imagination. Like stills from the filmed footage of a detonation, in each frame a building slumps further down the viewfinder: present, going, going… gone. Or so it seems. On closer inspection, it emerges that the building is still there. It is in… Read More
Notes on the 2016 Summer School
21 August 2016
Notes on the 2016 Summer School21 August 2016
Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More
Conjunction and Incongruity
1 September 2018
Conjunction and Incongruity1 September 2018
– Polly Gould
The word archive, meaning both the collection of documents and the building that houses them, is doubled in its meaning and it is not necessarily clear which one precedes the other. Drawing Matter Open Day highlighted in interesting ways the relation of causality between building and drawing as document or… Read More