Category: drawing histories
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad
12.05.2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12.05.2016
Published in 1970, fourteen years after the first Playboy Pad of 1956, and with ‘a new decade dawning’, this penthouse design by Robert Bray was presented as ‘the pinnacle of urban living’, combining ‘the latest technological and architectural advances with an idea as old as the hills’: Roman houses that were built… Read More
The Imperial Palace of God
09.05.2016
The Imperial Palace of God09.05.2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
Ducros: Arch of Titus
01.05.2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus01.05.2016
This drawing by the Swiss artist Abraham-Louis-Alphonse Ducros — a preliminary sketch with a deep perspectival view of the Arch of Titus in Rome, and inspired by Panini’s Arch of Titus, 1745 — is the basis for one of his standard images, a definitive view of Rome sold to eighteenth-century… Read More
On Drawing
04.02.2016
On Drawing04.02.2016
When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney
29.01.2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29.01.2016
Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More
Michael Webb: Sin Centre
05.12.2015
Michael Webb: Sin Centre05.12.2015
The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More
Three Projects (1969)
12.11.2015
Three Projects (1969)12.11.2015
I believe in the density of the sparse. The Diamond Thesis is both creative and analytical. It implies new points of view in architectural space. It delineates with clarity the frontal facet of isometric projection in the two-dimensional space of the picture plane of the drawings. The realisation that works… Read More
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City
06.11.2015
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City06.11.2015
Archizoom describe this ‘hypothetical theatre’ as part of a fluid and unstoppable culture, a non-stop metropolis re-imagined to fit the times, characterised by mobile theatres, unbound books, rooms without plan, unwritten music, … and cities made of voids. For the first time the presentation technique has … become a specific… Read More
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives
13.10.2015
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives13.10.2015
‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle
01.10.2015
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle01.10.2015
The watercolour of the Sainte-Chapelle drawn by Lassus dates from the first years of the restoration, when the desire to restore the monument to its original thirteenth-century form was still very strong. The chapel is shown without its fifteenth-century flamboyant rose window and its exterior staircase built by Louis XII,… Read More
New Babylon (1963)
03.09.2015
New Babylon (1963)03.09.2015
– Constant
The following is excerpted from Constant’s New Bablyon, 1963, and translated by Kenny Stevens. Books full of words, oral, printed traditions fixed the cities as a law of life for generations – conquered and vanquished before and re-erected. Buried under a hollowed time, or still an endless and compelling space,… Read More
A Life of Their Own (1985)
28.08.2015
A Life of Their Own (1985)28.08.2015
The following has been excerpted from Staying Creative; Artistic Passion is a Lifelong Pursuit – and These Mature Masters Prove the Point. (Otto Luening, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Rudolph), December 1985. I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It… Read More
John Lautner: House and Studio for Edgar Ewing
28.08.2015
John Lautner: House and Studio for Edgar Ewing28.08.2015
On presenting himself as a potential apprentice at Taliesin to Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., Lautner heard no objection except the sly comment that he would be ‘too big for the rooms’. Everything about his approach to visualising a design speaks to the distance from which this towering figure saw the… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father
14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Sketch from Vézelay from Letter to Mérimée (1843)
31.07.2015
Sketch from Vézelay from Letter to Mérimée (1843)31.07.2015
From a letter to Mérimée written in 1843 from Vézelay: You, Sir, who have ceaselessly lived the life of the past, you understand the joy, the secret happiness felt when we can record in our sketchbook some of these forgotten [historical] treasures … but how much more interesting when these… Read More
Wagnerschule
01.06.2015
Wagnerschule01.06.2015
The drawings of Emil Hoppe (1876 – 1957) and Otto Schönthal (1878–1961) attracted particular interest in the Land Marks exhibition, and people were eager for us to share them more widely. They are presented here with little comment and a few additions for context. These drawings by Emil Hoppe, Otto Schönthal and… Read More
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins
09.02.2015
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins09.02.2015
– Editors
This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s
29.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s29.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1815–1900
27.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1815–190027.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1900–1930s
26.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1900–1930s26.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part II: Unifying the city landscape: 1900–1930s The area of Finsbury in north London became a borough in 1900 and proposals rapidly appeared to replace the terraces of George Dance the Younger’s Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus with a large volume of continuous office blocks. John Belcher’s proposal seems to… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part III
03.06.2013
Future Scenarios, Part III03.06.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part I
30.05.2013
Future Scenarios, Part I30.05.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Capturing the rainbow: the city of tomorrow On any given day late in the 1930s, so someone has calculated, more than 30,000 Americans either bought a train ticket or ordered lunch looking at one of the murals of the designer Winold Reiss. With each new commission, and as the burdens… Read More
Displaced Persons
03.10.2012
Displaced Persons03.10.2012
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Architects are extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate into their visual descriptions of buildings any evidence that the real subject their structures serve, and around whose activities they are so carefully formulated, is people. Here’s a look at a few of the moments when this unspoken rule has been broken. Distances: Using… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part II
31.05.2016
Future Scenarios, Part II31.05.2016
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
FRAGMENTS: THE BUILDING SITE AND THE RUIN Louis-Jean Desprez turns to another legendary city of the ancient world — Alexander’s capital in Egypt — to advocate in a dream view of Alexandria in construction what great ambitions might be aroused in the new king of Sweden, after his predecessor, who… Read More
work on paper (series) DMC