Category: drawing histories
Working with Asplund
29 May 2020
Working with Asplund29 May 2020
Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer
28 May 2020
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer28 May 2020
– Sarah Handelman and Jaume Mayol
This drawing for a house in Mallorca joins a number of sketches we made to understand the project. Each space is made of separate elements. To understand the space you need to dive into each element, and to understand each element you need to be in the space. To draw… Read More
Eisenman: House VI (1985)
21 May 2020
Eisenman: House VI (1985)21 May 2020
The design of House VI was partly the result of Eisenman’s attempt to reconcile linguistic theories with architectural design. His interest in the work of Noam Chomsky, especially his theories of syntax, led to the investigation of possible analogies between language and architecture, and particularly the syntactic aspects of architectural… Read More
Calculated Aesthetics
19 May 2020
Calculated Aesthetics19 May 2020
The floor plan of the Losone gymnasium (1990–1997) by Livio Vacchini is a computer drawing made through the repetition of four basic elements: a rectangular black solid, and three types of short lines – one vertical and two diagonals in opposite directions. The black solid is copied with equal distance… Read More
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures
18 May 2020
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures18 May 2020
When he sat down to make the drawings that form this eight-page album of Roman buildings, Giovanni Battista Montano began by embossing lines onto the sheet with a stylus, straightedge and compass. Using natural black chalk, he then lightly sketched the principal parts and main particularities of the selected edifices.… Read More
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation
8 May 2020
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation8 May 2020
– Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey
John Tuomey: Let me tell you the story of this drawing. We were at one of those despairing moments when we were putting together our book Space for Architecture and feeling that we had never achieved anything of any substance. We didn’t have a lot of work going at that particular moment,… Read More
Animals
5 May 2020
Animals5 May 2020
– James Gowan and Ellis Woodman
excerpted from The Architecture of James Gowan: Modernity and Reinvention (2008)
Drawing on the Nolli Plan
1 May 2020
Drawing on the Nolli Plan1 May 2020
Every January, when John and I visit Rome, I bring a set of A3 photocopies of the Nolli plan (Giambattista Nolli’s Nuova Topografia di Roma, 1748). I don’t bring the whole map – it stretches to twelve sheets, each about A2 in size – so before arriving I am already editing… Read More
Scanning Shatwell
30 April 2020
Scanning Shatwell30 April 2020
Every image you see on your screen is known as a raster image. Every image is made up of millions of squares of colour, or pixels. Each file has a particular size, height and width, and within that frame, each pixel has a particular size, colour, intensity and location in… Read More
Plan with the form of a growling dog
29 April 2020
Plan with the form of a growling dog29 April 2020
I was drawing, endlessly it seemed, a hotel for a competition in Switzerland – fruitlessly as it turned out. I cheered myself along by seeing in the plan the face of an animal, a friendly bear, or more likely a dog. James’ ‘building with the form of a howling dog,’ which he… Read More
Shape
28 April 2020
Shape28 April 2020
Shape calls attention to things and their meanings. Architects, whether they mean to or not, give shape to things, and the people who see or inhabit those things, whether in full consciousness or not, respond to these shapes. The dimensions of this response are somewhat difficult to measure, since they… Read More
Space
27 April 2020
Space27 April 2020
Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More
Daria’s Aria
23 April 2020
Daria’s Aria23 April 2020
Between 1939 and 1941 the French-born, Milan-based editor Daria Guarnati published seven volumes of a series called Aria d’Italia. Each issue formed a substantial monograph on a distinct facet of Italian life and culture. The inaugural Christmas edition was followed by the evocatively titled issues ‘Italy through Colour’, ‘Mediterranean Summer’, ‘The… Read More
One Thing Leads to Another
23 April 2020
One Thing Leads to Another23 April 2020
Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23 April 2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23 April 2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects
16 April 2020
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects16 April 2020
I An abandoned house – a derelict phantom with no roof and no windows – reveals the twofold condition of architecture as image and as form. In San Cataldo, the image and form of death. As image: from afar, a metaphysical de Chirican presence, suspended between Adolf Loos’s project in… Read More
Where Words Fail
6 April 2020
Where Words Fail6 April 2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Web of Intrigue
3 April 2020
Web of Intrigue3 April 2020
Searching the internet for the drawings of Michael Sorkin, one comes across a lengthy list of the projects that have emerged from his eponymously titled studio. Halfway down the list can be found an exotic beauty of a drawing soberly captioned thus: House of the Future. 1999. Coloured Pencil, Hand… Read More
Drawing Culture at SOM New York
3 April 2020
Drawing Culture at SOM New York3 April 2020
When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30 March 2020
Houses of Work and Play30 March 2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
Behind the Walls
23 March 2020
Behind the Walls23 March 2020
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
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)
9 March 2020
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)9 March 2020
Alvar Aalto, from an interview for the Swedish newspaper Åbo Underrättelser, May 22, 1930. Reprinted in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: Sketches, trans. Stuart Wrede (London: MIT Press, 1979), 16.
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
5 March 2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)5 March 2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Grounded: Plans & Planning
29 April 2020
Grounded: Plans & Planning29 April 2020
– Richard Hall and Niall Hobhouse
The following is part of an email exchange between Niall Hobhouse and Richard Hall in response to Richard’s text on James Gowan and John Hejduk, One Thing Leads to Another. Niall Hobhouse: When you have time, I thought it would be interesting to encourage you to think about why it is… Read More
DMC sketch plan