Category: office cultures
Boompjes I
22.02.2019
Boompjes I22.02.2019
In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More
Roosevelt Island
17.02.2019
Roosevelt Island17.02.2019
The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban
16.02.2019
Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban16.02.2019
Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… Read More
Zaha Hadid
27.11.2018
Zaha Hadid27.11.2018
When, in January 1983, Peter Cook reviewed a recently held exhibition for Zaha Hadid’s 59 Eaton Place, he spoke of the resonance between the individual and their education in developing an architectural identity. [1] He pondered on the development of Hadid over that period, What if fate had led her… Read More
TEd’A Arquitectes
15.11.2018
TEd’A Arquitectes15.11.2018
– Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez
‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More
Madelon Vriesendorp
04.11.2018
Madelon Vriesendorp04.11.2018
– Niall Hobhouse and Madelon Vriesdendorp
Excerpted from Madelon Vreisendop in conversation with Niall Hobhouse, RIBA, 2 July 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India
07.09.2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India07.09.2018
Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More
Netherfield Scroll Two
28.08.2018
Netherfield Scroll Two28.08.2018
What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House
26.04.2018
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House26.04.2018
Somebody said the story about the orange is not right, but it is: he sent one of us over to the shop to buy an orange and he peeled it and took up the segments. Mogens Prip-Buus on Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House
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
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
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
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
Heathrow Airport Project
25.01.2017
Heathrow Airport Project25.01.2017
These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… 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
Robert Mylne
01.04.2016
Robert Mylne01.04.2016
There are two sons of Deacon Mylne’s in Rome at present, studying architecture. One of them had studied in France and has accordingly that abominable taste to perfection: the other, who came straight from Scotland, has made great progress and begins to draw extremely well, so that if he goes… Read More
James Gowan: The Expandable House
01.11.2015
James Gowan: The Expandable House01.11.2015
James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More
R. Norman Shaw
11.03.2018
R. Norman Shaw11.03.2018
– Andrew Saint
R. Norman Shaw (1831–1912) is commonly thought of as a domestic architect, but he built a fair number of churches, sixteen altogether, many of them original and remarkable in one way or another. There is an evolution in Shaw’s church designs from the emotional ardour of his earliest efforts, like… Read More
section elevation detail religion construction drawing plan DMC