Category: office cultures

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Adrian Hawker

In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: in cahiers

Nuno Melo Sousa: in cahiers

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. As we travel, sitting, walking, flying, and running, we can look at the world.As we sit, eating, we can look at a small cahier also sitting,… Read More

T.O.P. Office and the Accademia Bridge

T.O.P. Office and the Accademia Bridge

Luc Deleu

In a way, this project was architecturally ‘ready-made’. Our proposal for the Accademia Bridge can best be seen as an example of recycling and reuse. Formally, it sublimates what is available from a limitation of resources and materials. In the concept lies a wink to the (still naive in my… Read More

Construct

Construct

Richard Hall

In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More

Owen Luder: Practice at Work

Owen Luder: Practice at Work

Kate Wharton

The day-to-day workings of a practice such as OLP fall into two separate yet overlapping sectors: administration and job organisation. Unless these two are properly related and maintained, no amount of design talent, no amount of entrepreneurial vigour or personal charm will keep the practice alive and flourishing. For, despite… Read More

Drawing for James Stirling

Drawing for James Stirling

Walter Nageli

Looking back forty years or so on my time in the basement of Jim Stirling’s office in Gloucester Place feels like travelling centuries. Today it is inconceivable that a world-renowned architect and Pritzker Laureate would show a client around the office wanting him to look at the equipment and be… Read More

fala: butterflies

fala: butterflies

fala

This is the final of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Every discussion ends in a few drawn lines as words don’t do the job as well. A project is usually sketched between the lines that… Read More

fala: photography

fala: photography

fala

This is the seventh of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. We photograph the construction site a few times, to keep a certain moment for later. When construction ends, we photograph it again, intensely. Not just… Read More

fala: collages

fala: collages

fala

This is the sixth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. fala started with collages. An abundance of images populated the internet; at some point, an online presence was decidedly claimed. Collages were the closest we… Read More

fala: execution drawings

fala: execution drawings

fala

This is the fifth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Construction documents include an array of scales. General drawings, partials, maps, details, and indexes are loaded with intentions and manic descriptions. They are supposed to… Read More

fala: renders

fala: renders

fala

This is the fourth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Low-resolution images are humble and straightforward. The textures are blunt and the colours are strong. Ambient occlusion is mostly off. Light, shadows and reflections are rarely under… Read More

Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients

Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients

Paul Clarke

In October 1925 Le Corbusier wrote to his client Madame Meyer a remarkable letter about his proposal with Pierre Jeanneret for her villa. It combined drawings with a highly scripted text that carefully guided her through each space, from the entrance to the roof garden. Like the pioneers of early… Read More

fala: wireframes

fala: wireframes

fala

This is the third of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Wireframes are snapshots of three-dimensional models built solely from lines. Single-line plans and sections are extruded to form a light envelope. Its colours dismantle the… Read More

Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review

Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review

Erik Wegerhoff

There is a strange moment in the second room of the exhibition, where all kinds of great works are hung on the walls to admire, organised around a central display of plastic and aluminium furniture: a collage of a car hovering like the golden calf amidst a crazed crowd; a… Read More

fala: comprehensive

fala: comprehensive

fala

This is the second of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Normally, a project is depicted through a series of plans, sections, elevations, and some axonometric drawings, perhaps – every aspect of it explained and documented. We… Read More

Superstudio’s Collage Chest: A Chance Machine

Superstudio’s Collage Chest: A Chance Machine

Jonah Ginsburg

In 1968 Adolfo Natalini’s partner, Frances Brunton, returned to Florence from London with their newborn daughter and a small wooden chest with five drawers. On three sides of the chest, Natalini hand painted sky-blue flowers on an orange background. The chest of drawers was then taken to the Superstudio-studio in… Read More

fala: the single line

fala: the single line

fala

This is the first of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. It started from a rather liberating decision to omit thicknesses. Gradually, all the information that wasn’t central to our thinking was removed, avoiding any celebration… Read More

Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)

Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)

Matthew Blunderfield and André Patrão

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Parc de la Villette was emblematic of the strong ties made between the disciplines of architecture and philosophy in the 1980s, where… Read More

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Richard Hall

We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More

Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn

Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn

Michael Merrill

Extracted, with permission, from Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing edited by Michael Merrill, published by Lars Müller Publishers © 2021. Click here to read a review of this book by Stan Allen. An auspicious meeting: At the end of 1955, a thirty-five-year-old academic named Colin Rowe visited the office… Read More

Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici

Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici

Pier Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Gallanti and Maria S. Giudici

This is the nineteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, he talks to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici. Pan Scroll Zoom: Teaching… Read More

Working with Tony Fretton

Working with Tony Fretton

Jonathan Sergison

In the early 1990s a number of architects, academics and artists came together in a rather fluid manner, meeting regularly in my Bloomsbury apartment. Tony Fretton was older than most of us and had already established a clear critical position. The conversations we had, and sometimes the arguments, were instructive… Read More

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Daniel Studer

This drawing of the roof level of a fire station, designed as a student work in 1986, was for the ‘Analoge Architektur’ exhibition at the Architektur Forum Zurich. [1] While the drawing is the work of an individual, it was inconceivable without the competitive and collegial development of a drawing… Read More