Category: drawing histories

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Stan Allen

I arrived in Rafael Moneo’s Madrid office in early 1984. I had graduated from Cooper Union two years earlier and spent 18 months working for Richard Meier in New York.  I met Moneo in 1978 when he was teaching at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but I don’t… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Michael Wolfson

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

Gowan and Stirling

Gowan and Stirling

Fred Scott

This odd-shaped, yellowed analysis drawing by James Gowan, drawn directly onto heavy paper isn’t dated, and was probably added to years after the drawing was nearly complete. Ellis Woodman describes the drawing as ‘that drawing that James always kept in the box with his sketchbooks’. Unusually, when I first saw… Read More

Boompjes II

Boompjes II

Stefano de Martino

Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… Read More

Boompjes I

Boompjes I

Stefano de Martino

In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More

Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island

Zoe Zenghelis

The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Michael Wolfson

Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… Read More

Eric Parry: Iran, 1974

Eric Parry: Iran, 1974

Eric Parry

If I now open the page – this sketchbook is different to rest because at that time, one had time. There was no planning to any of these. No A to Z or intention of a grand plan. For the months involved there is not much evidence, only a hint… Read More

Schinkel

Schinkel

Kurt Forster

Schinkel’s architecture is of a piece with his life, yet in various ways, by picturing and publishing the work, he took himself out of it. He wanted to make sure that his architecture could stand on its own, however deeply it had been a part of him. He was, in… Read More

Eric Parry: India, 1975

Eric Parry: India, 1975

Eric Parry

This sketchbook results from a journey through west and northwest India focussed on the study of low-cost settlements in Bombay and Ahmedabad. It followed a seven-month period of research around nomadic environments in Iran and Kuwait. This mind- and eye-opening time was spent with colleague Andrew Thorne. Going back to… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More

Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Eszter Steierhoffer

‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid

Desley Luscombe

When, in January 1983, Peter Cook reviewed a recently held exhibition for Zaha Hadid’s 59 Eaton Place, he spoke of the resonance between the individual and their education in developing an architectural identity. [1] He pondered on the development of Hadid over that period,     What if fate had led her… Read More

Lina Bo Bardi: Public Plaza and Museum of Art São Paolo

Lina Bo Bardi: Public Plaza and Museum of Art São Paolo

Helen Thomas

This text is excerpted from Drawing Architecture (Phaidon, 2018) by Helen Thomas, which brings together over 250 drawings, with short narratives for each one about the circumstances in which they were made, the techniques used to produce them, and the realities that they were depicting.

Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935

Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935

John David Rhodes

Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More

TEd’A Arquitectes

TEd’A Arquitectes

Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez

‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More

Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett

Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett

Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo

The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More

Madelon Vriesendorp

Madelon Vriesendorp

Niall Hobhouse and Madelon Vriesdendorp

Excerpted from Madelon Vreisendop in conversation with Niall Hobhouse, RIBA, 2 July 2018

Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980

Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980

Editors

On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea — what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… Read More

Marco Frascari

Marco Frascari

Federica Goffi

Architectural theorist and architect Marco Frascari defined the brouillon as a drawing meant to be recopied, times and again. This is a generative drawing, that entices reflections in time and whose value lives up to, and even beyond, a time of making. A brouillon is a counter drawing, which encapsulates the significance of a… Read More

Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge

Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge

Jordan Kauffman

The Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Bridge is an unrealised project combining infrastructural and cultural programs: a vehicular bridge between two cities over the Red River, a performing arts building in Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River Valley heritage interpretive centre in Moorhead, Minnesota, and at the centre over the river itself, an… Read More

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Helen Thomas

Frail and delicate, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s drawing of a geodesic sphere floats, without context, in the space of the paper it inhabits. More than the form it reveals, the net of thin, red lines expresses the presence of the space within it. A perspective effect emanates from the central point… Read More