Category: drawing histories
Take Courage
08.03.2018
Take Courage08.03.2018
Architecture is born of experience, yet its realisation depends in no small measure on belief. Most buildings owe their existence primarily to evidence – the demonstrable proofs of the benefits they provide – for intuition must always be interrogated to justify the confidence placed in the architect. But the mysterious… Read More
AL_A: V&A Exhibition Road Quarter
05.03.2018
AL_A: V&A Exhibition Road Quarter05.03.2018
Farshid Moussavi’s brief for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition asked for representations of the complexities of designing and realising buildings and structures. We illustrated this by overlaying each level of intervention in a different colour – from the existing V&A stonework in green, the services in purple, to the… Read More
Herzog & de Meuron
23.02.2018
Herzog & de Meuron23.02.2018
A pair of drawings – a plan and a still image from a digital model – act like X-rays revealing the hidden forces at play in a complex project that brings together public and private uses including concert halls, plazas, restaurants, hotel functions, and residences, all in one building. The… Read More
Notes on the Sketchbook
19.02.2018
Notes on the Sketchbook19.02.2018
When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow
14.02.2018
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow14.02.2018
The Commons Overview These drawings were exhibited in ‘Off Location: Drawings for the US Embassy, Moscow’, an impromptu exhibition held at Pushkin House from 13–28 February 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition, curator Tim Abrahams gave a talk entitled ‘Fiction and Reality in Moscow’ at Pushkin House.
Drawings’ Conclusions
08.02.2018
Drawings’ Conclusions08.02.2018
The Campo Marzio project had its origins in a series of drawings done as far back as 1979, when I was a student at Cooper Union. I entered Cooper as a transfer student with a BA already in hand. I was originally placed in second year, but after a semester… Read More
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons
05.02.2018
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons05.02.2018
In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, architect Charles Edward Bassett, the design lead in SOM’s San Francisco office, was asked by Betty J. Blum how architectural education changed in the US when modernism became accepted in architectural schools and the Beaux-Arts tradition side-lined. What happened when the… Read More
Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals
25.01.2018
Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals25.01.2018
The following text is excerpted from an interview with Hans Van der Laan and Antoine Bodar, broadcast by Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), 24 December 1988. Given that we have reduced architecture to proportions – to a matter of measurements, which is akin to solving a mathematical problem, the design has not been created visually. This… Read More
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19.01.2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19.01.2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing
14.01.2018
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing14.01.2018
The idea of using tape drawings originated for climatic reasons: India goes through a five-month monsoon season each year, and during this time it is very humid. For us this meant that the drawings we were producing, which were printed on paper, had a very short lifespan. Lines would slowly… Read More
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont
07.01.2018
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont07.01.2018
– Editors
This large and exquisite drawing by Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont represents a garden design in the form of the plan of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza by Bernini. Serried ranks of trees rather than stone walls and columns are used to marshal a vast landscape into a perfect emblem of… Read More
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House
23.12.2017
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House23.12.2017
Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More
Anthony Salvin
18.12.2017
Anthony Salvin18.12.2017
As Torquay expanded in the mid-nineteenth century with the town’s prominence as a seaside retreat and a connection to the South Devon railway made in 1848, new churches were built to accommodate the increased number of parishioners and seasonal visitors. Whilst construction of the new church of St Mary Magdalene… Read More
Gilles-Marie Oppenord
15.12.2017
Gilles-Marie Oppenord15.12.2017
For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More
William Butterfield
06.12.2017
William Butterfield06.12.2017
Nothing Permitted But What Has Been Foreseen William Butterfield eschewed the illustrative perspective, preferring instead to develop even his studies as contract drawings that would serve three tasks: as presentations through which a project could be comprehended, as instructions from which his contractors and clients could not swerve, and as… Read More
The Sacred Games of Art
01.12.2017
The Sacred Games of Art01.12.2017
These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More
Herbert Matter
27.11.2017
Herbert Matter27.11.2017
This is the work of the Swiss photographer and designer Herbert Matter, who after a short career in New York had moved to California in 1943 with his wife, the American painter and art critic Mercedes Carles. Both were friends and associates of Fernand Leger, with whom Herbert had been… Read More
Dogma: The Room of One’s Own
13.11.2017
Dogma: The Room of One’s Own13.11.2017
– Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara
The Architecture of the Private Room These drawings are part of a series of 48 perspectives that depict the ‘private’ room from antiquity to the present day. They comprise a study of the private room as a specific architectural form. Each perspective is taken with a more or less consistent… Read More
Alvar Aalto’s city
01.11.2017
Alvar Aalto’s city01.11.2017
For whatever reason it is produced, a blueprint solidifies a moment in the design process and further solidifies the project. It is not necessarily the final moment, and often after the blueprints have been produced they might be annotated by one or the other master, resulting in new drawings from… Read More
The Clandeboye Drawings
27.10.2017
The Clandeboye Drawings27.10.2017
The seven Clandeboye drawings, each 35 × 35 cm and on A2 trace, were produced in 1984. The year is significant. Then the AA was busy maintaining a posture of indifference to Jenksian postmodernism, while the possibly visionary (at least in the case of architectural speculation) and certainly introspective 1970s… Read More
Archives, or Ardor
26.10.2017
Archives, or Ardor26.10.2017
Butter, fire, ardor: Roberto Calasso tells us that Vedic India is one of the earliest civilisations and one about which the least is known, having left nothing behind but a few fragments of enigmatic texts about worship and sacrifice. No buildings, no palaces, no traces of temples. Just the simple instructions… Read More
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon
01.03.2018
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon01.03.2018
– Basile Baudez, Alexandre Cojannot and Alexandre Gady
Built in the 16th century on the banks of the river Seine, west of Paris, the castle of Meudon stands amidst the great French Renaissance monuments that were ultimately destroyed. When it was bought by Abel Servien in 1654, the old castle – built under François I in brick and stone… Read More
domestic DMC elevation presentation