Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
The Facade is the Window to the Soul of Architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018
01.08.2018
The Facade is the Window to the Soul of Architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 201801.08.2018
– Adam Caruso and Helen Thomas
In response to the Biennale’s theme of Freespace, Caruso St John Architects put together an exhibition that celebrates the historical richness and social generosity of the façade. Whether a building is public or private, whatever its intended use, its façades have the responsibility to make a positive contribution to the public… Read More
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse
20.07.2018
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse20.07.2018
arq & Drawing Matter To launch the collaboration with Drawing Matter, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, the first issue of Volume 22 opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in an intense one-day session.… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16.07.2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16.07.2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan
13.07.2018
Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan13.07.2018
Volume 22, Issue 1 pp. 8–40 This issue of arq introduces the new collaboration with Drawing Matter. To launch the collaboration, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, this issue opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in… Read More
Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction
10.07.2018
Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction10.07.2018
The blue and pink cabin suffers from a few structural/constructional inadequacies. The first of these to be noticed is the door which binds within in its ‘frame’ (there is no frame as such; the short strap hinges simply hang off the boarding). The vertical boards which make the door have… Read More
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz
20.06.2018
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz20.06.2018
Inhabiting and transforming the lozenge-like space of a long room in the heart of the Central Pavilion’s labyrinth, an installation by Petra Gipp creates a series of veiled rooms, corners and framed views, making spaces both ordered and complex. Everything is luminous. Light drops drops down from the skylights opened… Read More
Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion
12.06.2018
Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion12.06.2018
Flooded with light cast across alluringly animated walls, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice is lined with drawings gathered together under the name of Architectural Ethnography. Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow Wow has been developing the thinking underlying this method of observing and recording the human environment since the… Read More
Talking to Drawings
08.06.2018
Talking to Drawings08.06.2018
Talking to Drawings was produced to accomapny the exhibition Disappear Here (RIBA, 2 May – 7 Oct 2018), which explored the history, application and implications of perspective, how it spans truth and illusion, linking the disciplines of art, architecture and mathematics, through material from the RIBA and Drawing Matter collections.… Read More
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus
23.05.2018
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus23.05.2018
This is a Drawing Room, a with-drawing room. It is simply a love-declaration to the architectural drawing. Four walls, three large doorways. One end calmer, the other more open. The first thing decided is a table-bench; the drawing flat on the tabletop – like when you draw it – and… Read More
Behind the Lines 5
10.05.2018
Behind the Lines 510.05.2018
Boughton MonchelseaMaidstone September 26, 1828 My lord, Please be so good as to find designs for the lodge that you commissioned, a habitation for your woodman, John Platt. I earnestly hope that it will be the ornament that you desired for your park improvements. I also enclose the books that… Read More
Empathy
08.05.2018
Empathy08.05.2018
Being that can be understood is language. – Hans-Georg Gadamer One of the items in the Drawing Matter collection is a notebook once owned by Álvaro Siza. In it is this sketch, made of the Royal Academy London, where he was asked to consider making some work for an exhibition.… Read More
Behind the Lines 4
28.03.2018
Behind the Lines 428.03.2018
Isabella Puddefoot settled herself on the sofa, picked up her embroidery, and after enquiring about his day at the bank, remarked to her husband Samuel: ‘I do declare I am quite spent; running up and down stairs all day is very trying to my constitution. It is eight flights from dealing… Read More
A. W. N. Pugin
13.03.2018
A. W. N. Pugin13.03.2018
In 1846 Viscount Feilding (later 8th Earl of Denbigh) married Louisa Pennant. She was the great-granddaughter of the topographer Thomas Pennant, and inherited his house, Downing Hall, in Flintshire. They decided to build a church to celebrate their marriage. The architect was Thomas Henry Wyatt (who also added to Downing). Building… Read More
R. Norman Shaw
11.03.2018
R. Norman Shaw11.03.2018
R. Norman Shaw (1831–1912) is commonly thought of as a domestic architect, but he built a fair number of churches, sixteen altogether, many of them original and remarkable in one way or another. There is an evolution in Shaw’s church designs from the emotional ardour of his earliest efforts, like… Read More
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon
01.03.2018
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon01.03.2018
– Basile Baudez, Alexandre Cojannot and Alexandre Gady
Built in the 16th century on the banks of the river Seine, west of Paris, the castle of Meudon stands amidst the great French Renaissance monuments that were ultimately destroyed. When it was bought by Abel Servien in 1654, the old castle – built under François I in brick and stone… Read More
Notes on the Sketchbook
19.02.2018
Notes on the Sketchbook19.02.2018
When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More
Behind the Lines 3
07.02.2018
Behind the Lines 307.02.2018
“Lord, Fanny, I had such a very strange encounter this morning. It being a Friday, I was delivering muffins down to that mad Lady Lewson in Cold Bath Square – her maid says she never washes and is most provoking – and as I was walking along the wall by… Read More
A Blueprint is… Blue
24.01.2018
A Blueprint is… Blue24.01.2018
A common error in looking at architectural drawings is to mistake mechanical reproductions for originals. Original and copy drawings both physically consist of two elements: the material (like ink) and the support (usually paper). But – and it may seem obvious to say – lines on paper are made by… Read More
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont
07.01.2018
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont07.01.2018
– Editors
This large and exquisite drawing by Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont represents a garden design in the form of the plan of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza by Bernini. Serried ranks of trees rather than stone walls and columns are used to marshal a vast landscape into a perfect emblem of… Read More
The Politics of the Image
05.01.2018
The Politics of the Image05.01.2018
– Maria S. Giudici, Joseph Mercer, Florian Scheucher, Keranie Theodosiou, Livia Wang, Sophie Williams and Feifei Zhou
My course, The Politics of the Image at the Royal College of Art, drew on the Drawing Matter Collection amongst others to explore the construction of images since the Renaissance. This construction has allowed a crafty lie to evolve, be challenged and ultimately influence reality – albeit not always in straightforward ways.… Read More
Richard J. Neutra
10.08.2018
Richard J. Neutra10.08.2018
– Nicholas Olsberg
‘Richard J. Neutra has carried on the Wagner tradition of experimentation in new forms, materials and methods of construction… an impetus to the intelligent solution of new problems.’ Ernestine M. Fantl on the Corona Avenue School, ‘Modern Architecture in California’ (Typescript Mimeograph, MoMA Archives, 1935) Just before 6 o’clock on… Read More
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