Architect: Peter Wilson
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 1
20 June 2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 120 June 2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversation held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: What led you to architecture to begin with, Peter? You began studying… Read More
Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs
22 May 2024
Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs22 May 2024
‘Geometric, rigorously drawn, and yet always signed somewhere with an asymmetrical fold or knot.’[1] While this could be a concise description of Peter Wilson’s work, it is in fact Roland Barthes writing in his book Empire of Signs (1970) about what he described as the Japanese ‘ecstasy of the package’.[2] Barthes was struck by… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29 January 2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29 January 2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 1985
28 April 2023
Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 198528 April 2023
– Editors
This project scrapbook was prompted by Drawing Matter’s recent acquisition of drawings by Peter Wilson and Luc Deleu, made in response to Aldo Rossi’s ‘Progetto Venezia’ brief for the 1985 Venice Biennale, which invited proposals for a new Accademia Bridge to replace the wooden one constructed in the 1930s. Wilson… Read More
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia
26 April 2023
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia26 April 2023
In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022
22 September 2022
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 202222 September 2022
Remote teaching as a pandemic consequence has already been a theme for Drawing Matter, in the January 2022 Melbourne University Venice Workshop it reached an almost surreal zenith. Remoteness is fundamental to Australia, whether the extreme separations of the outback or a pre-digital geographic estrangement from global cultural discourses. At… Read More
Drawing Powers 2: the object in the drawing
2 November 2021
Drawing Powers 2: the object in the drawing2 November 2021
This text is the second in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. First, I consider drawing as an adequate medium… Read More
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time
23 June 2021
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time23 June 2021
The absolute precision and technical specificity of Diderot’s encyclopaedia plates, particularly those devoted to Horlogerie, mark a critical moment in the transition from speculative to operative science, from the pre-industrial to a modernist ontology of technical instrumentalisation. Here on these pages, artisan craft is ransomed to the immanent logic of… Read More
Cartographies of the Imagination
4 June 2021
Cartographies of the Imagination4 June 2021
– Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah
Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More
BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania
27 May 2021
BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania27 May 2021
Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More
The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish
10 May 2021
The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish10 May 2021
A phenomenological reading of ‘bridge’ would not prioritise function (crossing) but this suspended moment. – Peter Wilson [1] A fish out of water, a lady in thought, floating ‘wilderness’. Things first have to be separated from each other so as to be united later on. [2] Peter Wilson’s drawings of… Read More
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing
26 April 2021
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing26 April 2021
How we look at architectural drawings is an inherently complicated topic. The issue arises from what we understand to appear and disappear on the page. The field of architecture has spent little time talking about what we see (and don’t see) on the surface of the drawing itself. One could… Read More
La Casa Della Falsita
5 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita5 February 2020
The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More
Eurolandschaft Dérive
1 April 2018
Eurolandschaft Dérive1 April 2018
The format is Japanese: a concertina sketchbook presented empty to me by Akira Suzuki shortly after the 1983 completion of our Tokyo Suzuki House design. The drawing format is also Japanese – influenced by our reading of Tokyo (documented in Western Objects + Eastern Fields, AA 1989). Tokyo is difficult for… Read More
The Clandeboye Drawings
27 October 2017
The Clandeboye Drawings27 October 2017
The seven Clandeboye drawings, each 35 × 35 cm and on A2 trace, were produced in 1984. The year is significant. Then the AA was busy maintaining a posture of indifference to Jenksian postmodernism, while the possibly visionary (at least in the case of architectural speculation) and certainly introspective 1970s… Read More
A Public Convenience
18 November 2016
A Public Convenience18 November 2016
Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2
22 July 2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 222 July 2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More
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