Category: on their own work

Two ideas of the House

Two ideas of the House

Fred Scott

This is probably my first collage with such a serious intent. It came about while I was working with Robin Evans at the Architectural Association. I made it during the second term of our collaboration running Unit 4 in the Diploma School. We had set out to determine a possible… Read More

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Maria Conen

A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr

The act of making a physical artefact involves a to-and-fro engagement with an idea, in which decisions are ‘made’ and re-thought, and then un-made before the idea is realised. This roundabout but essential process of adaption is carried out, in the work of my architectural practice, through the use of… Read More

The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s

The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s

Jean-Paul Jungmann

Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known for their innovative graphic design and spectacular photomontages which… Read More

A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother

A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother

Celia Scott

In this drawing of his project for a house for a sculptor, Ugo La Pietra tries to criticise the boxiness of the standard house and the context of the city. Working to synthesise the forms and disciplines of art and architecture, he draws an enveloping free-form volume on pillars. This… Read More

Narrative Architecture

Narrative Architecture

Nigel Coates

Executed after it opened, this drawing captures the intended vibrancy of one of my first built projects, a café tacked onto the front of a department store in downtown Shibuya. The architectural bricolage of the built space translated well into the mixed media technique of splurged acrylic paint, caked-on oil… Read More

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

Marcelo Ferraz

Please, draw a hand with three fingers folded and the index finger pointing, so that we can make the signs for the toilets and exits’, Lina Bo Bardi instructed me, but I hesitated. Timid in the early days of my internship and not knowing how to draw, I was being… Read More

Jørn Utzon

Jørn Utzon

Mogens Prip-Buus

I had been working from late 1956 to 1957 with Vilhelm Wohlert on the schemes of Louisiana and the summerhouse for Niels Bohr, and suddenly there was no more work. Wohlert, who knew all my weaknesses (he had been my teacher in my fifth year at school) advised me to… Read More

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

Hard lead pencils are unforgiving and require concentration, precision and humility when drawing with them. By using a hard lead the painterly effect associated with soft pencil sketches is avoided, with their tolerance to imprecision and visual sloppiness. Sketching with a hard lead requires focus. The joy of drawing a… Read More

Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women

Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women

William Mann

‘What’s it like?’: the experience of being there in a building is fundamental. That’s why we draw a lot in perspective (mostly eyeballed rather than constructed), because it offers the closest approximation to being there. But… moving through an urban environment formed by many buildings, reading signs, interpreting other people’s… Read More

Heathrow Airport Project

Heathrow Airport Project

Catrina Beevor

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

L’art tue

L’art tue

Jean-Paul Jungmann

L’ART TUE – Art Kills L’ART TUE was the name of a poster project, most likely between 1975 and 1976. It followed the theoretical and literary Groupe Utopie [Utopia Group] adventure and their publications between 1966 and 1969, and after the Aerolande development work which lasted until 1975. However, it came… Read More

Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre

Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre

Adam Caruso

We have been making model photographs for the last twenty-five years, and these images have always skirted between abstraction and concrete reality. They show a world where the atmosphere of our buildings is explicitly evoked at the same time as creating an uncanny sense of the actual size and material… Read More

Jessie Brennan

Jessie Brennan

Olivia Horsfall Turner

An image These drawings are an act of imagination. Like stills from the filmed footage of a detonation, in each frame a building slumps further down the viewfinder: present, going, going… gone. Or so it seems. On closer inspection, it emerges that the building is still there. It is in… Read More

Brunswick Centre

Brunswick Centre

Peter Myers

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

The Destruction of the City of Homs

Deanna Petherbridge

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

A Public Convenience

A Public Convenience

Peter Wilson

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

The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee

Helen Thomas

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

Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

Anthony Auerbach

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

Drawing Walmer Yard

Drawing Walmer Yard

Peter Salter

The following text is excerpted from the exhibition essay in Drawing Walmer Yard. Piano Nobile, Publications No. XLII 2016. ©Piano Nobile and Peter Salter. Walmer Yard consists of four houses designed by Peter Salter and developed by Crispin Kelly, London W11. … The plan becomes the major generator of form. Geometry, reciprocal… Read More

Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project

Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project

Alex Bank and Sam Casswell

The Garden Rooms academy drawing by Casswell Bank Architect’s is a depiction of the relationship between the new shed, the Maltings buildings and its gardens located at the western edge of Bruton. The drawing extends beyond the adjacent road connecting the town with the countryside and the river Brue that… Read More