Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15.07.2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15.07.2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
Charles de Wailly
10.06.2016
Charles de Wailly10.06.2016
The high level of ornamental detail and the conspicuously novel elements of stove and fountain suggest that this drawing may have been among those exhibition-drawings that de Wailly sent to the Paris Salon from 1771 onwards, the year he was controversially admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part II
31.05.2016
Future Scenarios, Part II31.05.2016
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
FRAGMENTS: THE BUILDING SITE AND THE RUIN Louis-Jean Desprez turns to another legendary city of the ancient world — Alexander’s capital in Egypt — to advocate in a dream view of Alexandria in construction what great ambitions might be aroused in the new king of Sweden, after his predecessor, who… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18.03.2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18.03.2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
13.03.2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813.03.2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)
11.03.2016
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)11.03.2016
The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More
Etudes des fragments d’architecture
06.03.2016
Etudes des fragments d’architecture06.03.2016
Signed and dated ‘à Rome 1777’, this drawing was one of a series of studies executed after the antique by Jean-Augustin Renard when a student in Rome, and later published in Paris in Etudes des fragments d’architecture (1783). The acanthus leaf is ubiquitous in Western ornament. Supremely versatile, it can be deployed… Read More
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture04.03.2016
The following has been excerpted from ‘Everything is Architecture’, Bau Magazine, 1968. Limited and traditional definitions of architecture and its means have lost their validity. Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication… Read More
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space04.03.2016
Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More
To Read A Drawing (1983)
12.02.2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12.02.2016
What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More
On Drawing
04.02.2016
On Drawing04.02.2016
When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney
29.01.2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29.01.2016
Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole
22.01.2016
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole22.01.2016
Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving… Read More
A Lung for the City (1984)
27.11.2015
A Lung for the City (1984)27.11.2015
The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings
15.11.2015
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings15.11.2015
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More
James Gowan: The Expandable House
01.11.2015
James Gowan: The Expandable House01.11.2015
James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More
Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System
23.10.2015
Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System23.10.2015
An element in this Viennese collective’s proposal to extend the city into a newly ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system, this ‘Cortina-Bob-Bahn’ would have ornamented the gardens of the Prater with a drive-yourself roller-coaster tower some 1500 metres high.
A Brutal Matter (1962)
16.10.2015
A Brutal Matter (1962)16.10.2015
Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives
13.10.2015
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives13.10.2015
‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More
Haus-Rücker-Co.
09.10.2015
Haus-Rücker-Co.09.10.2015
This art collective – we might call them the ‘house thief company’ or ‘house drawing company’– took its name from a pun on the verb ‘to draw’ and an old slang word for ‘thief’. Their projects during this period involved interventions in which a house or building would be ‘stolen’… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22.07.2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22.07.2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
publication theoretical & imaginary DMC