Category: drawing histories
Blind Spots
20.10.2017
Blind Spots20.10.2017
Architectural drawing is a strange and powerful tool. It is simultaneously a means of depiction and a way of constructing the world. That’s why, beyond the conventions of practice, the politics of the architectural image remain so significant. The drawing is the world we construct: its own ideas of subject, its modes… Read More
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot
05.10.2017
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot05.10.2017
This drawing depicts a site-specific public art project, commissioned by the retail developer David Burmant, which entombed twenty junked cars under a layer of asphalt in a suburban shopping plaza. James Wines was interested in upending expectations about common iconographic elements of suburbia by inverting the relationship between such objects… Read More
Aldo Rossi
30.09.2017
Aldo Rossi30.09.2017
In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More
Drawing from a Deep Well
22.09.2017
Drawing from a Deep Well22.09.2017
I make several different types of drawings in my life as an architect and as a teacher: those made at the speed of thought in B4 sketchbooks, on my lap or at the dining table or on trains or buses; tracing drawings made on bits torn from rolls of detail… Read More
Behind the Lines 1
22.09.2017
Behind the Lines 122.09.2017
I look at this drawing and imagine the following scenario: Rex Savidge, architect, is running short of time. He must submit his plan for a commercial development in Newcastle the following day. Giving it a last look over, he is generally pleased with it: he has taken particular care with the… Read More
Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)
13.09.2017
Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)13.09.2017
Farshid Moussavi’s brilliant call to display architectural working drawings as art in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show is about as canny a cultural move, vis-a-vis architecture exhibitions, as any in recent memory – and it could only come from an architect. At a stroke she presents architectural drawing at… Read More
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu
07.09.2017
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu07.09.2017
One cannot see these drawings without seeing the mural by Sol LeWitt, in which an electrician has subsequently installed doorbells and a light switch. The mural is in the entrance hall of a city palace that was for a time the entrance to a gallery. When the gallery stopped its… Read More
Drawings in Conversation
01.09.2017
Drawings in Conversation01.09.2017
C. R. Cockerell, Joseph Gwilt and the Royal Exchange Competition Owing to a faulty gas lamp, on the 10th January 1838 the Royal Exchange in the City of London was destroyed by fire. The loss of the building was seen to be potentially catastrophic for trade in the City and… Read More
USSR in Construction No. 9 1931
01.09.2017
USSR in Construction No. 9 193101.09.2017
Constructing a Fantasy of the New Moscow through Architectural Photographs In June 1931 Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a speech to the Moscow plenum entitled, Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiyu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (On the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and other Socialist Cities of the USSR). The… Read More
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’
31.08.2017
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’31.08.2017
In 1972 Adolfo Natalini spent a few months in the United States. The main event of his visit was the seminal exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York MoMA (May 26 – September 11, 1972). Nevertheless, Natalini spent these months not only working on perhaps the most existential project of… Read More
Concrete Beach
13.08.2017
Concrete Beach13.08.2017
This drawing was made with a chinagraph pen over the course of a holiday afternoon. It started out roughly, as a quick sketch, but time stretched out as more people filled the page. I like using chinagraph as it can be sensitive to great softness and also very dark lines. I like its texture – it is a very… Read More
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling
02.08.2017
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling02.08.2017
The very fact that The Builder should publish an article explaining the benefits, the uses and the methods of making architectural models indicates just how novel the concept was in 1895, even in theory. ‘Architecture Modelling’ was the result of the almost unprecedented display of an actual model at the Royal Academy… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22.07.2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22.07.2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
Charles Percier
17.07.2017
Charles Percier17.07.2017
A Clean Mess Cleanliness is a trait shared by many architects and Charles Percier was no exception. The charming anecdote is told of Percier, the son of a laundrywoman, going to great lengths to keep his sheets of drawing paper safe from the ubiquitous ash of his pipe. The architect… Read More
A Souvenir and Survey
22.06.2017
A Souvenir and Survey22.06.2017
While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… Read More
San Rocco
20.06.2017
San Rocco20.06.2017
This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
07.06.2017
Karl Friedrich Schinkel07.06.2017
In his designs for the Tilebein House, Schinkel makes considerable use of different colours corresponding to the nature of the materials depicted. To indicate iron he uses a darkish blue, for wood mostly yellow and, of course, when he wants to show cut masonry (he is building in brick), he… Read More
Guy Debord
07.06.2017
Guy Debord07.06.2017
‘But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the hands of the engraver … not to swell the work … but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents,… Read More
Celia Scott: L’Attente
31.05.2017
Celia Scott: L’Attente31.05.2017
Space Stares Back ‘Space’ has come to mean much more than the OED definition, although even there, for such a small word, it has a surprising length, depth and breadth of meaning. It is space that Celia Scott is defining in her ultimately abstract work. As a trained architect with… Read More
A Space / Two Spaces
30.05.2017
A Space / Two Spaces30.05.2017
The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate: Reading Writing Sleeping … Read More
All Change on Change Alley
05.10.2017
All Change on Change Alley05.10.2017
– Celina Fox
At one o’clock in the morning of 25 March 1748, a fire broke out in Exchange Alley in the heart of the City of London. It started in the powder room of a barber and wig maker and by the time it was extinguished, eighty houses had been destroyed and… Read More
topographic/cartographic publication public space plan