Category: on their own work

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the fifth and final in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have… Read More

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Tim Richardson

In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the fourth in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

Simon Fraser University

Simon Fraser University

Arthur Erickson

This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Peter Wilson

Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the third in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed by Kieran from a… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the second in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

On Drawing

On Drawing

Raimund Abraham

A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the first in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Alberto Johnsson, Arthur Masure, Daniel Nitsche, Toby Pullen and Alexander Turner

During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of… Read More

Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once

Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once

Stephen Bates

In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More

Remembering Architecture

Remembering Architecture

Fraser Stables

This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More

Elbe and Marte

Elbe and Marte

Karen Lohrmann and Stefano de Martino

Elbe and Marte is the spatial and ecological adjustment of a 16th-century rural complex and experimental landscape in the Gulf of Naples. Set deep into the coastal hillside, it encompasses a massive work of geo-engineering with rock and stone walls across 30 vertical terraces. It is a survey of time… Read More

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown

The following text is an excerpt from Denise Scott Brown’s 2018 Soane Medal lecture, written by Thomas Weaver, and developed out of a series of conversations between Denise Scott Brown and Thomas Weaver in July 2018. I have never thought of myself as a photographer, only an architect and urbanist,… Read More

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Various

Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More

Capilla Pajaritos

Capilla Pajaritos

Alberto Cruz

The following text was written by Alberto Cruz as an account of the project for a small chapel outside of Santiago (1952–3; first published in Spanish in 1954). It describes an unfolding process of design, framed around the guiding principles of observation, act, and, form—the key tenets of Cruz’s architectural… Read More

Chloethiel Woodard Smith

Chloethiel Woodard Smith

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

In June 2023 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, gave a talk about American modernist architect and urban planner Chloethiel Woodard Smith. Part of the series ‘Rethinking Architectural Legacies’ at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the talk was titled ‘How to Succeed as a Woman: Chloethiel Woodard… Read More

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

Alberto Cruz

Alberto Cruz presented the principles of The Palace of Dawn and Dusk (Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso) in the Open City’s Music Room on 19 January 1981[1]. While the initial project comprised four lodges with communal rooms, courtyards, and public baths, ultimately, as Cruz describes, following a ‘poetic revelation’… Read More

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

Nicholas Ray

Most of us must sometimes receive a message or a drawing that in retrospect we wish we’d retained—but they go astray. In my own case I can recall three: a note from the philosopher Bernard Williams about his friend Thomas Nagel (lost without record) a postcard from Göran Schildt clarifying our… Read More

Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream

Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream

António Choupina and Álvaro Siza

In this short video, António Choupina and Álvaro Siza discuss a sketch for an imaginary skyscraper from Caderno 32 (1979), now in the Drawing Matter Collection. Siza describes his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High Illinois’ or ‘Sky City’ tower (1957), and his work for Rogério de Azevedo on the… Read More

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

Tania Garduño Israde

In 2003, at the troubled age of eighteen, I started a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. The first semester was a disappointment, a disaster even. The extremely hierarchical and academic system in Italy was terribly discouraging for creativity and questioning. By raising your hand to… Read More

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

Peter Celsing

Peter Celsing won the competition to design the Härlanda Church, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1952, and the church was completed seven years later in 1959. The design of the project is a fragmented list of reflections by the architect in the account reproduced below—which was first drafted on receipts from the… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: weight

Nuno Melo Sousa: weight

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. They dance.They stand.They stare.They bend.They underline.They comply.They don’t comply.They question.They agree.They dismiss.They provoke.They ignore. Each and every one of them keeps a continuous movement between what… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

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. First, there were a couple of tense drawings.One, two, three. At the very third second, it quickly escalated to a nonstop dry pastel scratch on A2… Read More