Category: design methodologies
Narrative Architecture
10.03.2017
Narrative Architecture10.03.2017
Executed after it opened, this drawing captures the intended vibrancy of one of my first built projects, a café tacked onto the front of a department store in downtown Shibuya. The architectural bricolage of the built space translated well into the mixed media technique of splurged acrylic paint, caked-on oil… Read More
Jørn Utzon
03.03.2017
Jørn Utzon03.03.2017
I had been working from late 1956 to 1957 with Vilhelm Wohlert on the schemes of Louisiana and the summerhouse for Niels Bohr, and suddenly there was no more work. Wohlert, who knew all my weaknesses (he had been my teacher in my fifth year at school) advised me to… Read More
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook
02.03.2017
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook02.03.2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc
17.02.2017
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc17.02.2017
This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling
09.02.2017
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling09.02.2017
– Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan
Hard lead pencils are unforgiving and require concentration, precision and humility when drawing with them. By using a hard lead the painterly effect associated with soft pencil sketches is avoided, with their tolerance to imprecision and visual sloppiness. Sketching with a hard lead requires focus. The joy of drawing a… Read More
Architecture and Geology
07.02.2017
Architecture and Geology07.02.2017
What is the relation between the forces that shape buildings and those that shape the earth’s surface? How are the imaginative powers of architects heightened by their knowledge of geological processes? How is their handling of all the cultural, economic and material constraints on their practice enriched by exposure to… Read More
Michael Webb
01.02.2017
Michael Webb01.02.2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women
31.01.2017
Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women31.01.2017
‘What’s it like?’: the experience of being there in a building is fundamental. That’s why we draw a lot in perspective (mostly eyeballed rather than constructed), because it offers the closest approximation to being there. But… moving through an urban environment formed by many buildings, reading signs, interpreting other people’s… Read More
L’art tue
19.01.2017
L’art tue19.01.2017
L’ART TUE – Art Kills L’ART TUE was the name of a poster project, most likely between 1975 and 1976. It followed the theoretical and literary Groupe Utopie [Utopia Group] adventure and their publications between 1966 and 1969, and after the Aerolande development work which lasted until 1975. However, it came… Read More
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre
18.01.2017
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre18.01.2017
We have been making model photographs for the last twenty-five years, and these images have always skirted between abstraction and concrete reality. They show a world where the atmosphere of our buildings is explicitly evoked at the same time as creating an uncanny sense of the actual size and material… Read More
Projected Sections
15.01.2017
Projected Sections15.01.2017
The perspectival and axonometric section: Great Britain, around 1950-1970 As a technique of representation and a design tool, the perspectival or axonometric section acquired a central role in the field of residential architecture during the post war period in Great Britain. Various protagonists, for example Denys Lasdun (Cluster Block), Alison… Read More
Philip Webb
23.12.2016
Philip Webb23.12.2016
Philip Webb’s full scale drawing for the carving of the wooden frieze above the gallery of the hall at Clouds is an exquisite piece of draughtsmanship. But what make it so special are the small sketch and Webb’s instructions to the wood carver on the upper part of the sheet.… Read More
Brunswick Centre
05.12.2016
Brunswick Centre05.12.2016
It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
09.11.2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee09.11.2016
Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24.10.2016
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24.10.2016
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
Drawing Walmer Yard
04.10.2016
Drawing Walmer Yard04.10.2016
The following text is excerpted from the exhibition essay in Drawing Walmer Yard. Piano Nobile, Publications No. XLII 2016. ©Piano Nobile and Peter Salter. Walmer Yard consists of four houses designed by Peter Salter and developed by Crispin Kelly, London W11. … The plan becomes the major generator of form. Geometry, reciprocal… Read More
Malagueira and Évora, Portugal
19.09.2016
Malagueira and Évora, Portugal19.09.2016
– Cathy Hawley and Hugh Strange
School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University This year we have been examining the relationship between the ancient Roman, medieval and baroque city of Évora and the adjacent Malagueira public housing development – some 1100 low-rise units designed by Álvaro Siza from 1977 onwards in the aftermath of the revolution… Read More
High Ground
19.09.2016
High Ground19.09.2016
– Colette Sheddick and Pierre d'Avoine
School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University We have researched the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site (DVWHS) over the last three years. This year we investigated the impact of infrastructure on community and landscape. Transport networks and sites of extraction have scarred the English landscape over millennia. The pragmatics of… Read More
Beyond Object-ness, a Good House
19.09.2016
Beyond Object-ness, a Good House19.09.2016
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University In the design research we do in practice and in our discussions with students, we are continuously working with ideas of space. We are not interested in form following function. Firstly it should be a good room,… Read More
Notes on the 2016 Summer School
21.08.2016
Notes on the 2016 Summer School21.08.2016
Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More
Michael Graves
07.08.2016
Michael Graves07.08.2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Galli da Bibiena
10.03.2017
Galli da Bibiena10.03.2017
– Fabrizio Ballabio
In 1732, renowned architect and painter Ferdinando Galli da Bibiena published a meticulously compiled document illustrating a theory of perspective for the specific use of the architect and the painter. The book was intended for the students of Bologna’s Accademia Clementina (currently the city’s Academy of Fine Arts) and had… Read More
concept & diagram theatre section publication