Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
OMA in Scheveningen
22.07.2020
OMA in Scheveningen22.07.2020
Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More
A Glasgow Effect
17.07.2020
A Glasgow Effect17.07.2020
I draw and make dens to counter the weather of Scotland and the urban dislocation that I experienced from growing up in Glasgow, a city that suffered disproportionately from devastating post-war planning policy and the imposition of industrial modern architecture. The consequences of this are described by the medical term… Read More
Venice Biennale (1985)
14.07.2020
Venice Biennale (1985)14.07.2020
The third edition of the Venice Biennale in 1985, ‘Progetto Venezia’, directed by Aldo Rossi, had two major themes: the priority given to the moment of planning and the comparison with the Venetian landscape. For the 1985 exhibition, architects were invited to display their designs for the ‘requalification or the… Read More
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)
10.07.2020
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)10.07.2020
From a letter to The Times of April 18, 1929: At this season of the resurrection of Nature — that ever-fresh miracle — one thing happens that even keen bird-lovers seem hardly to appreciate to the full. I mean the birds’ Morning Hymn. We have all heard vaguely about ‘Bird… Read More
The Conservative (1941)
06.07.2020
The Conservative (1941)06.07.2020
All along the wide stony high street of Chipping Campden one is aware of stopped clocks. Time has been strenuously and persistently defied – almost successfully. Even the public telephone box – after a short struggle with the Post Office – has been allowed to wear the protective colouring of… Read More
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza
26.06.2020
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza26.06.2020
Inside the cover of Álvaro Siza’s sketchbooks, there is a whole world: the real and the imagined. In his personal registers of the real, Siza accepts the world as it is. He uses drawing in a playful but productive way, learns when he apprehends, absorbs when drawing. This process of… Read More
Instead of an Article (1958)
03.06.2020
Instead of an Article (1958)03.06.2020
‘As I cannot write an article, this dialogue is intended to replace it. It is only partially authentic, but that, of course, is also the case with the classical dialogues.’ Alvar Aalto in Arkkitehti-Arkitekten (1958): Sigfried Giedion: ‘What do I see, old friend, are you planning to write?’ Alvar Aalto:… Read More
On William Kent (1771)
19.05.2020
On William Kent (1771)19.05.2020
Here is Walpole’s famous one-liner, but with the remainder of his text on William Kent quoted in full; this is as Pevsner, in his unpublished Visual Planning and the Picturesque, apparently intended it to be. He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the… Read More
The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)
11.05.2020
The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)11.05.2020
The Royal Academy’s 1859 summer exhibition, combined with a number of architectural drawings on display in Conduit Street, left a less than positive impression on critic C. H. Smith. In an article published by The Builder, Smith describes what he sees as a decline in the quality of the architectural… Read More
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)
04.05.2020
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)04.05.2020
Extracted, with permission, from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, published by East of Borneo Books © 2012. The publication is available at East of Borneo.
Grounded: Plans & Planning
29.04.2020
Grounded: Plans & Planning29.04.2020
– Richard Hall and Niall Hobhouse
The following is part of an email exchange between Niall Hobhouse and Richard Hall in response to Richard’s text on James Gowan and John Hejduk, One Thing Leads to Another. Niall Hobhouse: When you have time, I thought it would be interesting to encourage you to think about why it is… Read More
Haiku
28.04.2020
Haiku28.04.2020
Here John Cage is writing in November 1950 to Cecil Smith, the Editor of Musical America, in passionate defence of Eric Satie, who had been attacked in the journal in an article by Abraham Skulsky. In 1948, Cage had delivered a controversial talk at Black Mountain College, titled ‘Defense of Satie,’… Read More
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension
28.04.2020
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension28.04.2020
The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More
Daria’s Aria
23.04.2020
Daria’s Aria23.04.2020
Between 1939 and 1941 the French-born, Milan-based editor Daria Guarnati published seven volumes of a series called Aria d’Italia. Each issue formed a substantial monograph on a distinct facet of Italian life and culture. The inaugural Christmas edition was followed by the evocatively titled issues ‘Italy through Colour’, ‘Mediterranean Summer’, ‘The… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23.04.2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23.04.2020
– 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
Ruskin: Fairy Tales
22.04.2020
Ruskin: Fairy Tales22.04.2020
We all have a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imagining or picturing of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary respect for this power, wherever we can recognise… Read More
Retail Therapy
30.03.2020
Retail Therapy30.03.2020
In architectural design the size of the human unit must always be borne in mind. It is nowhere more necessary to observe this maxim than in the determination of the scale of shop fronts, for here not only is the tendency to an undue magnification of parts most strongly encouraged… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25.03.2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25.03.2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
Behind the Walls
23.03.2020
Behind the Walls23.03.2020
Albert, an artist known only by his first name, thinks about buildings in ways similar to an architect. As he draws, he imagines the structures on the page having a future life in bricks and mortar, considering as he does so whether the audience for his drawings will ask themselves,… Read More
Summerson: The Little House
04.03.2020
Summerson: The Little House04.03.2020
– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.
Seeing, and Disbelieving
02.03.2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving02.03.2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan
01.03.2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan01.03.2020
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28.07.2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28.07.2020
– 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
sketch Extracts: Where to Begin? projection (axonometric isometric) topographic/cartographic landscape religion