Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19.09.2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19.09.2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Living in Colour
17.09.2019
Living in Colour17.09.2019
Since 1963, when I left London to work and stay in Sardinia, I kept and still keep a yearly agenda/diary, one day for a page, to note the place where I am, the weather, the appointments, the site visits and the other sort of events of some interest. These are… Read More
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’
23.08.2019
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’23.08.2019
The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22.08.2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22.08.2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
Behind the Lines 11
12.08.2019
Behind the Lines 1112.08.2019
Robert Schnebbelie peered into the Egyptian Hall wondering what freak show was on view, and then set himself down next door outside the oil and Italian warehouse, Sherborn & Sams. He looked across Piccadilly at the entrance to Burlington Arcade that created a neat endstop to the long wall of… Read More
Learning from the Tortoise
09.08.2019
Learning from the Tortoise09.08.2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
The Matter of Drawing
03.08.2019
The Matter of Drawing03.08.2019
The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More
Grandorge’s Pavilion
21.07.2019
Grandorge’s Pavilion21.07.2019
The timber pavilion shown in the film is being transported to its third incarnation, and from inside another shed to its second locale in Shatwell farmyard, where it will serve as a new temporary office for the Timber Frame Company Ltd. The TFC constructed the Peter Smithson Obelisk that has… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types
26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More
Halsey Ricardo
22.06.2019
Halsey Ricardo22.06.2019
Early in 1916, RIBA president Halsey Ricardo reported on an acquisition that, when added to the works of Bibiena, Palladio, Jones and Wren, would begin to build a more continuous corpus of the drawn history of architecture. [1] This was a large set of sketchbooks and project drawings ‘from a… Read More
Behind the Lines 10
19.06.2019
Behind the Lines 1019.06.2019
It was undoubtedly the doing of that ancient buffer Lutyens, Samuel Hardy reflected sourly, as he stared at the pages of the September 1932 issue of The Builder and saw an illustration of the winning entry. It showed Mr Edward H Banks of ‘Villa Desiré’, Downlands Road, Purley, Surrey’s awful concoction of… Read More
On Cornices, Part I
17.06.2019
On Cornices, Part I17.06.2019
In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More
Ugliness and Judgment
19.04.2019
Ugliness and Judgment19.04.2019
In the summer of 1740, John Wood the Elder ventured his first study of the lithic monuments that surrounded his native city of Bath, drawing sketches of the stones at Stanton Drew. These earned him the patronage of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, which enabled Wood to undertake more… Read More
Schinkel
08.02.2019
Behind the Lines 9
02.02.2019
Behind the Lines 902.02.2019
Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through the… Read More
Dance Dance Revolution
30.12.2018
Dance Dance Revolution30.12.2018
In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More
Behind the Lines 8
04.12.2018
Behind the Lines 804.12.2018
Annette Berthe Schlegel, wife of Adalbert, mother of Mariana, Friedrich, Werner and Elmira, and grandmother to little Wilhelm and Lydia, died peacefully in her cherry wood bed at home in Marienstrasse, Stuttgart, on March 29th, 1812. Adalbert, a successful watchmaker, had held Annette dear, and two weeks after the funeral… Read More
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935
20.11.2018
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 193520.11.2018
Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More
Behind the Lines 7
31.10.2018
Behind the Lines 731.10.2018
Mr. Tassie’s House On June 27th 1807 William Tassie scratched his long nose, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and finished off his letter to Alexander Wilson Esq of Messrs. Dunlop & Wilson, Booksellers of Glasgow: ‘I have been near a twelve month engaged with alterations in my house –… Read More
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980
23.10.2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023.10.2018
– Editors
On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea — what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… Read More
Behind the Lines 12
23.09.2019
Behind the Lines 1223.09.2019
– Philippa Lewis
1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More
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