Category: drawing histories
TEd’A Arquitectes
15 November 2018
TEd’A Arquitectes15 November 2018
– 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
11 November 2018
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett11 November 2018
– 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
4 November 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp4 November 2018
– 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
23 October 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023 October 2018
– 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
20 October 2018
Marco Frascari20 October 2018
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
15 October 2018
Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge15 October 2018
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
9 October 2018
Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere9 October 2018
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
Hugh Ferriss
4 October 2018
Hugh Ferriss4 October 2018
In 1916 a series of laws came into force in the city of New York called the Zoning Ordinance, the first of its kind in America, which regulated building use, area and height of new buildings.
Artists at Work
14 September 2018
Artists at Work14 September 2018
I recently had the pleasure of jointly selecting a group of drawings from the Katrin Bellinger collection for the exhibition Artists at Work at the Courtauld Gallery, London (3 May to 15 July 2018). The title is generically applied to her focused collection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs concerned with artists’… Read More
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India
7 September 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India7 September 2018
Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More
Netherfield Scroll Two
28 August 2018
Netherfield Scroll Two28 August 2018
What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More
Behind the Lines 6
13 August 2018
Behind the Lines 613 August 2018
Richard Bentley cracked open the red seal, smiling as he always did at the peculiar crest of a man in a ridiculous long-tasselled hat, and folded out the letter. His mood was anxious; he scratched his head nervously with one hand and knocked over the ink on his drawing table with… Read More
Yacht Club Path
2 August 2018
Yacht Club Path2 August 2018
I The drawings have different stories. They don’t have a linear story, a beginning date and then a finished date at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in the beginning before the project is built and then continue during the construction of the project and sometimes too – actually, quite often… Read More
Onto an Epicycle of Cones
30 July 2018
Onto an Epicycle of Cones30 July 2018
This drawing is part of a series that interrogates the orthographic drawing techniques of Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) set out in his posthumous treatise, Architettura civile, (1737). While some of the drawings from the series deal with the direct documentation of his orthographic drawings, this particular drawing translates his written and drawn instructions… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16 July 2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16 July 2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz
20 June 2018
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz20 June 2018
Inhabiting and transforming the lozenge-like space of a long room in the heart of the Central Pavilion’s labyrinth, an installation by Petra Gipp creates a series of veiled rooms, corners and framed views, making spaces both ordered and complex. Everything is luminous. Light drops drops down from the skylights opened… Read More
Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’
19 June 2018
Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’19 June 2018
What light may Schinkel’s drawings shed on Building Information Modelling (BIM) practice? In 1806 the young Schinkel was asked to develop a residence design from a set of initial layout plans. He drew a façade section, a peristyle detail and a column capital, before the war began and the commission… Read More
Talking to Drawings
8 June 2018
Talking to Drawings8 June 2018
Talking to Drawings was produced to accomapny the exhibition Disappear Here (RIBA, 2 May – 7 Oct 2018), which explored the history, application and implications of perspective, how it spans truth and illusion, linking the disciplines of art, architecture and mathematics, through material from the RIBA and Drawing Matter collections.… Read More
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus
23 May 2018
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus23 May 2018
This is a Drawing Room, a with-drawing room. It is simply a love-declaration to the architectural drawing. Four walls, three large doorways. One end calmer, the other more open. The first thing decided is a table-bench; the drawing flat on the tabletop – like when you draw it – and… Read More
Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37
12 May 2018
Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 3712 May 2018
Drawings, personal notes and poems flow across nearly 170 little pages and three months of Alberto Campo Baeza’s life, recorded during 2010 in an architectural sketchbook that he presented to the V&A in 2015. While scripted predominantly in Spanish, much is penned in English in which Campo Baeza is fluent.… Read More
Empathy
8 May 2018
Empathy8 May 2018
Being that can be understood is language. – Hans-Georg Gadamer One of the items in the Drawing Matter collection is a notebook once owned by Álvaro Siza. In it is this sketch, made of the Royal Academy London, where he was asked to consider making some work for an exhibition.… Read More
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House
26 April 2018
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House26 April 2018
Somebody said the story about the orange is not right, but it is: he sent one of us over to the shop to buy an orange and he peeled it and took up the segments. Mogens Prip-Buus on Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House
Remembered Space
22 April 2018
Remembered Space22 April 2018
A subtle and beguiling assemblage of recent works by Celia Scott is appropriately mounted on the plywood walls of the intimate Velorose Gallery, Charterhouse Square, London (13th April to 18th May 2018). Plywood, aluminium and carefully modulated surfaces that are revealed or obscured by spray paint are the stuff of… Read More
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935
20 November 2018
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 193520 November 2018
– 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
presentation urban form public space DMC