Category: drawing histories
Philip Webb
23.12.2016
Philip Webb23.12.2016
Philip Webb’s full scale drawing for the carving of the wooden frieze above the gallery of the hall at Clouds is an exquisite piece of draughtsmanship. But what make it so special are the small sketch and Webb’s instructions to the wood carver on the upper part of the sheet.… Read More
Gowan: A Rather Beautiful Coherence
12.12.2016
Gowan: A Rather Beautiful Coherence12.12.2016
James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More
Brunswick Centre
05.12.2016
Brunswick Centre05.12.2016
It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More
The Destruction of the City of Homs
28.11.2016
The Destruction of the City of Homs28.11.2016
A photograph of the bombed-out shell of Dresden, destroyed in February 1945 when I was six years old, has lived potently in my life-long memory bank. This, like other black and white photographs of the time, depicted a ghastly desolation in which empty-windowed facades tapering sharply from jaggedly pointed upper… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23.11.2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23.11.2016
Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More
Charles Percier
18.11.2016
Charles Percier18.11.2016
Design for a Samovar The drawing is preparatory for the samovar in silver-gilt, eventually executed in 1808 by Henry Auguste for Queen Hortense (Les Grands Orfevres de Louis XIII a Charles X, Paris 1965, p. 273). The piece bears the marks of the years 1795–8, and 1798–1809. The design was… Read More
A Public Convenience
18.11.2016
A Public Convenience18.11.2016
Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
09.11.2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee09.11.2016
Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More
Paul Robbrecht
02.11.2016
Paul Robbrecht02.11.2016
Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds
24.10.2016
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds24.10.2016
Paper by Anthony Auerbach read at the Architectural Drawings Symposium, Shatwell, 24 April 2016. I would like to introduce two items from this collection, or rather two collections our host has brought together, whose cohabitation here prompted me to consider whether they are related and whether the relation can be… Read More
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24.10.2016
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24.10.2016
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
Alexander Brodsky
15.10.2016
Alexander Brodsky15.10.2016
There is someone behind Alexander Brodsky’s unfired clay facades. It might be a housekeeper behind one, a bored Kafkaesque rond-de-cuir behind another. It could be just an architect. They all draw and archive the objects and spaces they discover in these buildings, and reassemble them like an archeologist reassembles what he excavates:… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Michael Graves
07.08.2016
Michael Graves07.08.2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’
01.08.2016
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’01.08.2016
The great poet carefully instructs Francis Bird on the memorial tablet for his father – also Alexander Pope – to be placed in the north gallery of St Mary’s, Twickenham. Pope asks the sculptor to record his own respect for his father, to leave a space for his mother’s name… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
01.08.2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation01.08.2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means,… Read More
Jean-Baptiste Lassus
01.08.2016
Jean-Baptiste Lassus01.08.2016
After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22.07.2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22.07.2016
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15.07.2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15.07.2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
Charles de Wailly
10.06.2016
Charles de Wailly10.06.2016
The high level of ornamental detail and the conspicuously novel elements of stove and fountain suggest that this drawing may have been among those exhibition-drawings that de Wailly sent to the Paris Salon from 1771 onwards, the year he was controversially admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.… Read More
François-Joseph Bélanger
04.06.2016
François-Joseph Bélanger04.06.2016
This drawing is one of more than twenty alternative designs for a room in the Paris mansion built for Anne-Victoire Dervieux opera dancer and, from 1794, the architect and designer Bélanger’s wife. Bélanger imagines for Dervieux a scheme of ‘Etruscan’ arabesques loosely inspired by the archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and… Read More
Aitchison / Prendergast
30.12.2016
Aitchison / Prendergast30.12.2016
– Helen Thomas
This finely detailed watercolour drawing is a perfect miniature representation by George Aitchison of his proposal for the composition of a wall in the morning room of Lord Leconfield’s house in Chesterfield Gardens, London, 1881. The figures that define the room – the door and its frame, the fireplace and… Read More
elevation presentation art practice domestic interior