Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review
18 July 2022
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review18 July 2022
The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron
14 July 2022
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron14 July 2022
This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son
4 July 2022
Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son4 July 2022
We have republished below an extract from Robert Lutyens’ short biography of his father, published in 1942, while Robert was serving in the RAF and two years before Edwin died. The book itself is uncomfortable — an odd mixture of personal portrait, family background, and an attempt to at once… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24 June 2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24 June 2022
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook
22 June 2022
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook22 June 2022
This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… Read More
Hélène Binet: The Outsider
19 May 2022
Hélène Binet: The Outsider19 May 2022
a new way of looking at the world Working in my kitchen in the mornings of the 2020 spring.All is silent. Am I silent or is the whole world?In the darkness, you hear better, said Aristotle.In silence and in a closed environment, can you see better? Suddenly the walls of… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29 April 2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29 April 2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19 April 2022
‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19 April 2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel
14 April 2022
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel14 April 2022
The plans of the Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel were drawn nearly two hundred years apart, and yet they both speak to the Ruskian timelessness of the ruin. The temple and chapel are representative of their respective ages, with the former alluding to Romanticism’s longing for a pastoral past free… Read More
Materia: Render
12 April 2022
Materia: Render12 April 2022
Render, a sticky viscous coloured slop traditionally applied by hand with a float, hawk and trowel to solid form, first as inchoate lumps, then smoothed down or mottled, to scatter particles of light in diffuse haphazard ways. Inaugurated as the application of mere ground to wall, mud render allowed a… Read More
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence
7 April 2022
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence7 April 2022
In 1991, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron prepared a submission with the artist Remy Zaugg for the Berlin Morgen (‘Berlin Tomorrow’) exhibition organised by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. By surrounding Berlin’s Tiergarten with four new buildings, they proposed to restructure the park – then perceived as… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth
10 August 2022
W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth10 August 2022
– Hugh Strange
This is the first text in this series where Hugh Strange will be visiting key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Here we start at the beginning with Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, first published in 1891. In many respects, and certainly in relation to his later output, William Richard Lethaby’s… Read More
literature