Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
James Gowan: Inside the sketchbook
2 March 2017
James Gowan: Inside the sketchbook2 March 2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
1 March 2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project1 March 2017
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
Paolo Soleri
22 February 2017
Paolo Soleri22 February 2017
Over an advertisement for a series of workshops in the Arizona desert in 1979 ran the legend: ‘Soleri is in the desert not to escape the city for some pastoral dream but to create a wholly new urban civilization.’ It is not known when he started referring to himself in… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc
17 February 2017
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc17 February 2017
This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More
Perry Kulper
14 February 2017
Perry Kulper14 February 2017
‘Spatial Blooms’ and Digital Expectations Within the currently dominant visual culture, architectural drawing is persistently called to compete with a wide range of digital modes of visualisation, as well as fabrication, that tend towards simulation rather than representation. Is architectural drawing rendered redundant in this proliferation of digital renderings? And,… Read More
Michael Webb
1 February 2017
Michael Webb1 February 2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
Superstudio: Cinematography
30 January 2017
Superstudio: Cinematography30 January 2017
It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More
James Malton
30 January 2017
James Malton30 January 2017
Trees and Clouds: the picturesque, perspective and aquatint An early architectural use of aquatint was James Malton’s 1798 book An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle, That Peculiar Mode of Building Which Was Originally the Work of Chance. Malton took his authority from Uvedale Price’s An Essay… Read More
Gordon Matta-Clark
19 January 2017
Gordon Matta-Clark19 January 2017
The Genesis of Architecture (and the Genetics of an Anarchitect) During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single… Read More
Projected Sections
15 January 2017
Projected Sections15 January 2017
The perspectival and axonometric section: Great Britain, around 1950-1970 As a technique of representation and a design tool, the perspectival or axonometric section acquired a central role in the field of residential architecture during the post war period in Great Britain. Various protagonists, for example Denys Lasdun (Cluster Block), Alison… Read More
Aitchison / Prendergast
30 December 2016
Aitchison / Prendergast30 December 2016
This finely detailed watercolour drawing is a perfect miniature representation by George Aitchison of his proposal for the composition of a wall in the morning room of Lord Leconfield’s house in Chesterfield Gardens, London, 1881. The figures that define the room – the door and its frame, the fireplace and… Read More
Philip Webb
23 December 2016
Philip Webb23 December 2016
Philip Webb’s full scale drawing for the carving of the wooden frieze above the gallery of the hall at Clouds is an exquisite piece of draughtsmanship. But what make it so special are the small sketch and Webb’s instructions to the wood carver on the upper part of the sheet.… Read More
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence
12 December 2016
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence12 December 2016
James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23 November 2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23 November 2016
Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
9 November 2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee9 November 2016
Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More
Louis Bricard
8 November 2016
Louis Bricard8 November 2016
The Dominican monastery in the centre of the city of Laval on the Loire was seized during the first year of the Revolution, while an expansion was in construction, and then acquired by the regional government as its seat of administration. In 1803 the medieval cloister and chapel were demolished… Read More
On Collecting
3 November 2016
On Collecting3 November 2016
The following text is an excerpt from a conversation between Niall Hobhouse and Farshid Moussavi, published in FunctionLab, Issue #14: Collecting. This thrill in informally assembling material of different types from different centuries and places into narratives that are new and unfamiliar is based on probing what can be learned… Read More
Paul Robbrecht
2 November 2016
Paul Robbrecht2 November 2016
Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24 October 2016
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24 October 2016
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
Alexander Brodsky
15 October 2016
Alexander Brodsky15 October 2016
There is someone behind Alexander Brodsky’s unfired clay facades. It might be a housekeeper behind one, a bored Kafkaesque rond-de-cuir behind another. It could be just an architect. They all draw and archive the objects and spaces they discover in these buildings, and reassemble them like an archeologist reassembles what he excavates:… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond
9 March 2017
On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond9 March 2017
– Marcelo Ferraz
Please, draw a hand with three fingers folded and the index finger pointing, so that we can make the signs for the toilets and exits’, Lina Bo Bardi instructed me, but I hesitated. Timid in the early days of my internship and not knowing how to draw, I was being… Read More
furniture & object design concept & diagram theoretical & imaginary DMC