Architect: Michael Webb

In the Archive: Edouard Cabay

In the Archive: Edouard Cabay

Edouard Cabay

Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). Hello Niall! I have had many thoughts, and I wanted to try to put a few down here. But there is one that is more pressurizing than the others: are there any trouts around? I am a very keen (yet not… Read More

Alternative Histories: Havana architectuur on Michael Webb

Alternative Histories: Havana architectuur on Michael Webb

When asked to design a model based on one of Michael Webb’s illustrious drawings of the Sin Centre project for Leicester Square (London 1961) we immediately thought about our project for a 500 cars garage (in collaboration with L.U.S.T. architecten) at the edge of the town of Ghent, which is… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More

Michael Webb

Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian

In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb

The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

Michael Webb

All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.

Simplification

Simplification

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