Architect: Iannis Xenakis

The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression

The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression

Matthew Mindrup

The following text discusses the use of models as an integral part of the architectural process. It is excerpted from Matthew Mindrup’s article on the roles of models in the design of the Sydney Opera House and Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair (arq:… Read More

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Stan Allen and José Oubrerie

‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More

BV Doshi: Drawn Closer

BV Doshi: Drawn Closer

Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman

I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More

Future Scenarios, Part III

Future Scenarios, Part III

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More