Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil

Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil

David G. De Long

The renderings for Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt Memorial to the Soil (1936) show the project’s incorporation of earth berms as a major component of its design. In a sense, the earth itself became architecture. About his design, as inscribed on the pencil drawing above, Wright wrote that the project was… Read More

Protected: Frank Lloyd Wright in London

Protected: Frank Lloyd Wright in London

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on construction drawings by architects architects and designers. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live in the Drawing… Read More

The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville

The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville

Editors

Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York, was one of three co-operative Usonian communities founded in the late 1940s. The other two, The Acres (also known as Galesburg Country Homes) and Parkwyn Village were both near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They all involved Frank Lloyd Wright as the overall site planner and in each… Read More

The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture

The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture

Maarten Delbeke

The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘The Cornice’, GTA Papers 6 (2021). It is one of the outcomes of the work done in preparation for the exhibition The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Architecture and Art, which was on show at the Graphische Sammlung of ETH… Read More

Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter

Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter

Adrian Forty, Niall Hobhouse and Philippa Lewis

This film was recorded in the Drawing Matter archive on the afternoon of Friday 28 November. It records a conversation between Philippa Lewis, Adrian Forty and Niall Hobhouse, about some of the drawings behind Philippa’s new book, Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter (2021). The film was… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright, House for Edith Carlson, 1939, Part II

Frank Lloyd Wright, House for Edith Carlson, 1939, Part II

Philippa Lewis

Extracted from Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter by Philippa Lewis, published by MIT Press © 2021. Order the book here. The drawings around which Stories from Architecture are written are all part of the Drawing Matter collection. Some of the texts were first published as ‘Behind the Lines’. My dear Miss Carlson, By… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright, House for Edith Carlson, 1939, Part I

Frank Lloyd Wright, House for Edith Carlson, 1939, Part I

Philippa Lewis

This is part one of the true story of librarian Edith Carlson, who in 1938 commissioned a house from Frank Lloyd Wright. The letters that document the project are now in the Drawing Matter collection. Extracted from Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter by Philippa Lewis, published by MIT Press… Read More

The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple

The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple

Frank Lyons

The Architecture of Nothingness: Drawing the Drawings As architects we have learned to read drawings almost instantly. At a glance we see what the spaces feel like, what it will be like to move around the building and perhaps even get a sense of the appropriateness of the structure. This ‘presentational’ way… Read More

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Cameron Lintott

When the ‘hard-line drawing’ has become so synonymous with the image of the architect it is easy to forget that the convenience of the everyday pen is relatively recent. For most of the long history of the world’s second-oldest profession, pen, paint and ink were reserved for competition boards or… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Elizabeth Hatz on Frank Lloyd Wright

Startha Éagsula: Elizabeth Hatz on Frank Lloyd Wright

Elizabeth Hatz

a vanished gardenthe oriental plan eclipses an obsession with circlesall spaces on their way to evaporateany momentthe terrible weight of void implodes into a dome turned sidewayson its way down, breast-feeding earthmidway of life – garden of deathlight words lift like invisible balloonsthe perspective of cantilevered canopies is relentlessin heavy… Read More

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

Nicholas Olsberg

Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin and Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin and Fallingwater

Adam Sutherland

The formative history of Frank Lloyd Wright – leading to Fallingwater – touches upon many of the themes that run through the exhibition ‘The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind’ (Hauser & Wirth Somerset till May 7th). The idea that there is a rural mindset, an… Read More

Dissecting

Dissecting

Andrew Clancy

Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More

The changing metropolis 1900–1930s

The changing metropolis 1900–1930s

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Part II: Unifying the city landscape: 1900–1930s The area of Finsbury in north London became a borough in 1900 and proposals rapidly appeared to replace the terraces of George Dance the Younger’s Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus with a large volume of continuous office blocks. John Belcher’s proposal seems to… Read More

Displaced persons

Displaced persons

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