Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Behind the Lines 2
19.12.2017
Behind the Lines 219.12.2017
An idle (and very fanciful) speculation on the origin of a drawing Gloria Gigliotti, hosiery buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue, looked at the drawing that Paddy O’Neil from the Art Department had bought in to her office that morning. She had asked him, for a quick $5.00 on the side,… Read More
Gilles-Marie Oppenord
15.12.2017
Gilles-Marie Oppenord15.12.2017
For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More
Archives, or Ardor
26.10.2017
Archives, or Ardor26.10.2017
Butter, fire, ardor: Roberto Calasso tells us that Vedic India is one of the earliest civilisations and one about which the least is known, having left nothing behind but a few fragments of enigmatic texts about worship and sacrifice. No buildings, no palaces, no traces of temples. Just the simple instructions… Read More
All Change on Change Alley
05.10.2017
All Change on Change Alley05.10.2017
At one o’clock in the morning of 25 March 1748, a fire broke out in Exchange Alley in the heart of the City of London. It started in the powder room of a barber and wig maker and by the time it was extinguished, eighty houses had been destroyed and… Read More
Behind the Lines 1
22.09.2017
Behind the Lines 122.09.2017
I look at this drawing and imagine the following scenario: Rex Savidge, architect, is running short of time. He must submit his plan for a commercial development in Newcastle the following day. Giving it a last look over, he is generally pleased with it: he has taken particular care with the… Read More
USSR in Construction No. 9 1931
01.09.2017
USSR in Construction No. 9 193101.09.2017
Constructing a Fantasy of the New Moscow through Architectural Photographs In June 1931 Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a speech to the Moscow plenum entitled, Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiyu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (On the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and other Socialist Cities of the USSR). The… Read More
Drawings in Conversation
01.09.2017
Drawings in Conversation01.09.2017
C. R. Cockerell, Joseph Gwilt and the Royal Exchange Competition Owing to a faulty gas lamp, on the 10th January 1838 the Royal Exchange in the City of London was destroyed by fire. The loss of the building was seen to be potentially catastrophic for trade in the City and… Read More
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’
31.08.2017
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’31.08.2017
In 1972 Adolfo Natalini spent a few months in the United States. The main event of his visit was the seminal exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York MoMA (May 26 – September 11, 1972). Nevertheless, Natalini spent these months not only working on perhaps the most existential project of… Read More
Notes on the 2017 Summer School
19.08.2017
Notes on the 2017 Summer School19.08.2017
– Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed
Drawing, Making, Thinking ‘Working in philosophy, like work in architecture in many respects, is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things, (and what one expects of them).’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Diary, 1931 Nana Biamah-Ofosu: In Wittgenstein’s words I recognise my own pursuit… Read More
Salvador Dalí
28.07.2017
Salvador Dalí28.07.2017
There is evidence that Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic study for a building facade is part of a real project, but we don’t know what that might be. The sketch resists interpretation and association, far different from anything else Dalí produced at the time: 1939 – a year in which he has… Read More
Dissecting
25.07.2017
Dissecting25.07.2017
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22.07.2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22.07.2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
A Souvenir and Survey
22.06.2017
A Souvenir and Survey22.06.2017
While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… Read More
San Rocco
20.06.2017
San Rocco20.06.2017
This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More
Guy Debord
07.06.2017
Guy Debord07.06.2017
‘But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the hands of the engraver … not to swell the work … but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents,… Read More
Celia Scott: L’Attente
31.05.2017
Celia Scott: L’Attente31.05.2017
Space Stares Back ‘Space’ has come to mean much more than the OED definition, although even there, for such a small word, it has a surprising length, depth and breadth of meaning. It is space that Celia Scott is defining in her ultimately abstract work. As a trained architect with… Read More
A Space / Two Spaces
30.05.2017
A Space / Two Spaces30.05.2017
The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate: Reading Writing Sleeping … Read More
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena
19.05.2017
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena19.05.2017
When, in the two-point perspective drawings of Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the viewer’s line of sight ricocheted off the centre and shot in opposite directions off stage, a new prospect of social and architectural order was proposed. For the century preceding the work of the brothers – Antonio, Giuseppe, and Ferdinando… Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
04.05.2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer04.05.2017
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
Permanence
18.04.2017
Permanence18.04.2017
Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect
09.04.2017
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect09.04.2017
A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More
Parataxis
28.12.2017
Parataxis28.12.2017
– Matthew Wells
‘Whatever elements that may come to hand or that are selected from the profusion of materials within reach, are combined with words to create a simple poetic image. This should amuse, disturb, mystify or provoke reflection. These images above all should entertain – the only sure road to appreciation.’ Man… Read More
projection (axonometric isometric) publication DMC Vienna School plan