Category: drawing histories

Hugh Ferriss

Hugh Ferriss

Helen Thomas

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

Artists at Work

Deanna Petherbridge

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

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Niall Hobhouse

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

Netherfield Scroll Two

Michael Gold

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

Behind the Lines 6

Philippa Lewis

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

Yacht Club Path

Alberto Ponis

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

Onto an Epicycle of Cones

Mark Ericson

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

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz

Helen Thomas

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’

Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’

Lok-Kan Chau

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

Talking to Drawings

Sam Jacob

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

Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus

Elizabeth Hatz

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

Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37

Neil Bingham

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

Empathy

Andrew Clancy

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

Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House

Mogens Prip-Buus

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

Remembered Space

Deanna Petherbridge

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

Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini

The tryptic Ink on Mirror is part of a collection of elevation studies developed over the past three years by my office, Atelier Manferdini. My reason for compiling a suite of digital sketches was rooted in the belief that for the past twenty years computers have been able to produce new geometrical… Read More

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn

These two drawings of the Hounslow gate, however, belong to a different kind of drawing, which happens less frequently, possible only every few months. It often happens at a moment in the design process when progress is slowing, the range of issues we are exploring seems too restricted, a sense… Read More

Dominique Perrault Architecte

Dominique Perrault Architecte

Dominique Perrault

Pavilion Dufour, Château de Versailles, Developed Horizontal Wood Blades, Wall Covering began as a working document, resulting from the exchanges and developments between the acoustician, my team and the company engaged to build the acoustical panels covering the walls of the auditorium. This document immediately caught my attention because it seemed… Read More

Nicholas Grimshaw

Nicholas Grimshaw

Nicholas Grimshaw

This axonometric of the Arthur Phillip High School illustrates the very inner workings of the building. Stripped bare of its materiality – the steel and concrete frame, the inner and outer facades and interior finishes – to reveal the network of elements which make the building come alive. These vital… Read More

Eurolandschaft Dérive

Eurolandschaft Dérive

Peter Wilson

The format is Japanese: a concertina sketchbook presented empty to me by Akira Suzuki shortly after the 1983 completion of our Tokyo Suzuki House design. The drawing format is also Japanese – influenced by our reading of Tokyo (documented in Western Objects + Eastern Fields, AA 1989). Tokyo is difficult for… Read More

WilkinsonEyre

WilkinsonEyre

Chris Wilkinson

This drawing presents a snapshot of the BIM model from the northern end of Battersea Power Station. Combined with a point cloud survey of the existing fabric, it overlays newer elements of construction with layers of the historic model. Careful selection of the information presented makes it possible to see… Read More

Niall McLaughlin

Niall McLaughlin

Níall McLaughlin

ALZHEIMER’S RESPITE CENTRE, DUBLIN We had six sites to look at and we did a feasibility study for each one. We eventually ended up with one which in many ways is not very satisfactory for people with dementia because it is an eighteenth-century walled garden. But what we did was… Read More

R. Norman Shaw

R. Norman Shaw

Andrew Saint

R. Norman Shaw (1831–1912) is commonly thought of as a domestic architect, but he built a fair number of churches, sixteen altogether, many of them original and remarkable in one way or another. There is an evolution in Shaw’s church designs from the emotional ardour of his earliest efforts, like… Read More