Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
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
– Editors
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
– Editors
‘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
– Editors
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
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents
02.10.2015
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents02.10.2015
– Editors
1-170-604: Zelthaut für ein kugelkalottenförmiges Zeltgestell 1-097-653: Bauwerk in Kugel- oder Kugelabschnittform 1-292-354: Räumliches Gitterwerk für Gewölbe, Kuppeln 926-229: Geodesic Dome 1-294-387: Dôme à construction triangulée 1-009-850: Geodesic Structures
Isolation or Participation?
11.09.2015
Isolation or Participation?11.09.2015
Isolation or participation? The immersions were allusions to two contrary attitudes ever present in the deportment of so many in this era: a readiness to join the currents of social change or a determination to isolate oneself, waiting for what might be next.
Preamble to a New World (1963)
04.09.2015
Preamble to a New World (1963)04.09.2015
– Constant
Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.
New Babylon (1963)
03.09.2015
New Babylon (1963)03.09.2015
– Constant
The following is excerpted from Constant’s New Bablyon, 1963, and translated by Kenny Stevens. Books full of words, oral, printed traditions fixed the cities as a law of life for generations – conquered and vanquished before and re-erected. Buried under a hollowed time, or still an endless and compelling space,… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father
14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Wagnerschule
01.06.2015
Wagnerschule01.06.2015
– Editors
The drawings of Emil Hoppe (1876 – 1957) and Otto Schönthal (1878–1961) attracted particular interest in the Land Marks exhibition, and people were eager for us to share them more widely. They are presented here with little comment and a few additions for context. These drawings by Emil Hoppe, Otto Schönthal and… Read More
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins
09.02.2015
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins09.02.2015
– Editors
This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More
Potomania (1982)
08.01.2015
Potomania (1982)08.01.2015
Call it ‘Potomania’ — plants and flowers above all … a column of water cascading freely on to a little pond … the column a staff both shining and singing.
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s
29.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s29.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1815–1900
27.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1815–190027.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1900–1930s
26.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1900–1930s26.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part II: Unifying the city landscape: 1900–1930s The area of Finsbury in north London became a borough in 1900 and proposals rapidly appeared to replace the terraces of George Dance the Younger’s Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus with a large volume of continuous office blocks. John Belcher’s proposal seems to… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part III
03.06.2013
Future Scenarios, Part III03.06.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More
To Read A Drawing (1983)
12.02.2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12.02.2016
– Peter Eisenman
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
DMC sketch projection (axonometric isometric) domestic