Category: design methodologies
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold
03.03.2020
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold03.03.2020
– Biba Dow
Giorgio Morandi’s work focused on studying again and again a small group of domestic objects – vases, jugs, bottles – in his home in Bologna. During his adult life, he produced a large quantity of paintings and etchings which together build up a shimmering representation of his field of focus.… Read More
Seeing, and Disbelieving
02.03.2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving02.03.2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’
28.02.2020
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’28.02.2020
– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.
Next Year in Yemen
09.02.2020
Next Year in Yemen09.02.2020
‘Next year, there will be a civil war in Yemen. Please lend me the money so I can go now,’ I had the wit to ask my parents. It was after my first year in architecture school, not knowing that this journey would come to define me as an architect.… Read More
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer
06.02.2020
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer06.02.2020
– Tony Fretton and Sarah Handelman
Sometimes you make drawings to tell yourself the project is going okay. Well, that’s what I do. This drawing came quite late in the design of the first Lisson Gallery. In the way I used to work, you would reach a point where you’d have a very thorough sense of… Read More
Espelho Álvaro
15.01.2020
Espelho Álvaro15.01.2020
This mirror was among the objects, sketches and photographs at his great exhibition at Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea. Siza was in a corner of the hall with some friends. More than a thousand guests from the Milano-bene (well-to-do Milanese) had come for a vernissage with fur coats, television spotlights, beautiful women, men… Read More
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
08.01.2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino08.01.2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Imaginal Cloud Spaces
31.12.2019
Imaginal Cloud Spaces31.12.2019
Many hours can be spent on what art historian Mary Berry calls ‘the sheer act of looking’ at the Japanese folding-screen paintings titled Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto). [1] Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such paintings captured a seemingly complete image of the capital city. Through the consistent use of… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24.12.2019
A Dose of Dosio24.12.2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
From a Little Below and to the Right
17.12.2019
From a Little Below and to the Right17.12.2019
There is a characteristic recurrence in Lutyens’ drawings of a quickly sketched oblique perspective in his own hand. Apparently, this is added as an afterthought once the orthogonal image of the building itself has been fully developed elsewhere (sometimes by assistants), and both usually appear on the same sheet. Invariably,… Read More
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture
07.11.2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture07.11.2019
I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s
25.10.2019
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s25.10.2019
Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image
03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image opened at the RIBA’s Heinz Gallery on 8 October 1975 and ran until 29 November. The exhibition was a drawings show of mostly unbuilt works and Price was at once the subject, designer and organiser. Writing in the Architects’ Journal, Sutherland Lyall, the journal’s building editor,… Read More
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21.09.2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21.09.2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19.09.2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19.09.2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22.08.2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22.08.2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan
19.08.2019
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan19.08.2019
This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More
The Matter of Drawing
03.08.2019
The Matter of Drawing03.08.2019
The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types
26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More
Halsey Ricardo
22.06.2019
Halsey Ricardo22.06.2019
Early in 1916, RIBA president Halsey Ricardo reported on an acquisition that, when added to the works of Bibiena, Palladio, Jones and Wren, would begin to build a more continuous corpus of the drawn history of architecture. [1] This was a large set of sketchbooks and project drawings ‘from a… Read More
On Cornices, Part I
17.06.2019
On Cornices, Part I17.06.2019
In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm
08.03.2019
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm08.03.2019
This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More
Behind the Walls
23.03.2020
Behind the Walls23.03.2020
– Matt Page
Albert, an artist known only by his first name, thinks about buildings in ways similar to an architect. As he draws, he imagines the structures on the page having a future life in bricks and mortar, considering as he does so whether the audience for his drawings will ask themselves,… Read More
sketch theoretical & imaginary domestic