Category: on their own work

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

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

Pier Vittorio Aureli

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

The Birth of the Column

The Birth of the Column

Álvaro Siza

The following text is excepted from an interview with Kate Goodwin, in: Sensing Spaces, Architecture Reimagined, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. All drawings are by Álvaro Siza, 2013–2014, for the design, placement and installation of three columns in precast yellow concrete, first in the courtyard of Burlington House and then in… Read More

Robert Mylne

Robert Mylne

Robert Adam

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

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Peter Eisenman

The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More

Etudes des fragments d’architecture

Etudes des fragments d’architecture

Jean-Augustin Renard

Signed and dated ‘à Rome 1777’, this drawing was one of a series of studies executed after the antique by Jean-Augustin Renard when a student in Rome, and later published in Paris in Etudes des fragments d’architecture (1783). The acanthus leaf is ubiquitous in Western ornament. Supremely versatile, it can be deployed… Read More

Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture

Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture

Hans Hollein

The following has been excerpted from ‘Everything is Architecture’, Bau Magazine, 1968. Limited and traditional definitions of architecture and its means have lost their validity. Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication… Read More

Hans Hollein: Infinite Space

Hans Hollein: Infinite Space

Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More

To Read A Drawing (1983)

To Read A Drawing (1983)

Peter Eisenman

What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More

The Continuous Monument

The Continuous Monument

Adolfo Natalini

My sketchbooks show a really typical project called the Continuous Monument. The Monument was a demonstration of the falsity and the absurdity of some of the theories that went on in that period. We started producing images of this sort of continuous monument, the continuous strip of urbanisation which was… Read More

On Drawing

On Drawing

Adolfo Natalini

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

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Carlos Diniz

The following is excerpted from Two Continuous Monuments, by Nicholas Olsberg. Published in the AA Files No. 71, 2015. The architect’s guiding idea has been to create a building which would ‘literally tend to disappear – becoming one with the landscape’ … The dramatic architectural concept and primarily coniferous flora… Read More

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb

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

View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)

View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)

Michael Webb

All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.

A Lung for the City (1984)

A Lung for the City (1984)

Cedric Price

The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More