Category: on their own work
Siza at Sixteen
10.07.2020
Siza at Sixteen10.07.2020
– Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza
Pouco a pouco, quase sem dar por isso, o carvão começou a não partir, o papel a não manchar, o miolo de pão a manter a plasticidade, o fôlego a aumentar. E a confiança. Slowly but steadily, unwittingly, the lead began to not break, paper to not stain, the bread… Read More
Fresh and Surprised
02.07.2020
Fresh and Surprised02.07.2020
Indische Buurt is a suburban area at the eastern edge of Amsterdam that is rich with diverse ethnicities, building ages and spatial experiences. The streets are named after islands and, as a territory historically built upon reclaimed land, there is an overriding feeling of an archipelago: islands that are places… Read More
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views
15.06.2020
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views15.06.2020
Rear Views I joined the Stirling office in September 1976, working late hours through the length of four years until my return to Dublin towards the end of 1980. Straight out of college and into my first proper job, the critical years in my formation as an architect. I had… Read More
Staging Brancusi
15.06.2020
Staging Brancusi15.06.2020
– Sarah Handelman and Asli Çiçek
Sarah Handelman: When we started talking about your work in scenography almost a year before, you were in the middle of designing the Brancusi exhibition, which opened last October at BOZAR in Brussels. Since then I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with you about the kinds of stages that… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer
11.06.2020
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer11.06.2020
This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans
06.06.2020
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans06.06.2020
– Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song
This drawing, the first in our ‘Naked Plan’ series, overlaps 107 A3 sheets of construction drawings for House P, a private house in Pyeonchang-dong, Seoul (2013-15). Stripped in Autocad of all information, such as image, text and mtext, line weight, saturation and lightness, only the basic lines remain. Through the… Read More
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti
05.06.2020
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti05.06.2020
Small sauna is part of a peculiar farm, where architecture is important. Sheltered by dense vegetation, the site is located on a steep incline on the edge of a valley grooved by water in a landscape of rolling fields, above the residential building and barnyard of an old dairy farm.… Read More
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer
28.05.2020
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer28.05.2020
– Sarah Handelman and Jaume Mayol
This drawing for a house in Mallorca joins a number of sketches we made to understand the project. Each space is made of separate elements. To understand the space you need to dive into each element, and to understand each element you need to be in the space. To draw… Read More
New Welfare Island (1978)
27.05.2020
New Welfare Island (1978)27.05.2020
In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these projects are… Read More
Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)
26.05.2020
Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)26.05.2020
Two fragments of texts paired with two fragments of process. Writing in the May 1976 issue of Architecture + Urbanism, Rossi reflects on two projects: the Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan and the Fagnano Olona in the Lombardy region. In both of the drawings placed alongside the architect’ s writing, the forms… Read More
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer
12.05.2020
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer12.05.2020
Initiatief 86 was important because (as Robbrecht en Daem) it was more or less our first real work for art. It was also an important moment for the Belgian art scene. That summer Jan Hoet curated Chambres d’Amis, exhibiting the work of 50 artists in homes across Ghent. At the… Read More
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation
08.05.2020
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation08.05.2020
– Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey
John Tuomey: Let me tell you the story of this drawing. We were at one of those despairing moments when we were putting together our book Space for Architecture and feeling that we had never achieved anything of any substance. We didn’t have a lot of work going at that particular moment,… Read More
Animals
05.05.2020
Animals05.05.2020
– James Gowan and Ellis Woodman
excerpted from The Architecture of James Gowan: Modernity and Reinvention (2008)
Drawing on the Nolli Plan
01.05.2020
Drawing on the Nolli Plan01.05.2020
Every January, when John and I visit Rome, I bring a set of A3 photocopies of the Nolli plan (Giambattista Nolli’s Nuova Topografia di Roma, 1748). I don’t bring the whole map – it stretches to twelve sheets, each about A2 in size – so before arriving I am already editing… Read More
Scanning Shatwell
30.04.2020
Scanning Shatwell30.04.2020
Every image you see on your screen is known as a raster image. Every image is made up of millions of squares of colour, or pixels. Each file has a particular size, height and width, and within that frame, each pixel has a particular size, colour, intensity and location in… Read More
Plan with the form of a growling dog
29.04.2020
Plan with the form of a growling dog29.04.2020
I was drawing, endlessly it seemed, a hotel for a competition in Switzerland – fruitlessly as it turned out. I cheered myself along by seeing in the plan the face of an animal, a friendly bear, or more likely a dog. James’ ‘building with the form of a howling dog,’ which he… Read More
Shape
28.04.2020
Shape28.04.2020
Shape calls attention to things and their meanings. Architects, whether they mean to or not, give shape to things, and the people who see or inhabit those things, whether in full consciousness or not, respond to these shapes. The dimensions of this response are somewhat difficult to measure, since they… Read More
Space
27.04.2020
Space27.04.2020
Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23.04.2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23.04.2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects
16.04.2020
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects16.04.2020
I An abandoned house – a derelict phantom with no roof and no windows – reveals the twofold condition of architecture as image and as form. In San Cataldo, the image and form of death. As image: from afar, a metaphysical de Chirican presence, suspended between Adolf Loos’s project in… Read More
Language & the Doorn Manifesto
14.04.2020
Language & the Doorn Manifesto14.04.2020
The following audio clips are extracts from an interview with Peter Smithson conducted in 1997 for the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. To listen to the full interview, click here. On language Peter Smithson on the change from the use of French to English as the predominant language of… Read More
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer
07.04.2020
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer07.04.2020
In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More
Haiku
28.04.2020
Haiku28.04.2020
– John Cage
Here John Cage is writing in November 1950 to Cecil Smith, the Editor of Musical America, in passionate defence of Eric Satie, who had been attacked in the journal in an article by Abraham Skulsky. In 1948, Cage had delivered a controversial talk at Black Mountain College, titled ‘Defense of Satie,’… Read More
graphic design correspondence letters ephemera DMC