Category: project & building histories
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text
18 February 2025
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text18 February 2025
Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More
Protected: Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing
17 February 2025
Protected: Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing17 February 2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Drawing on Ideas
17 February 2025
Drawing on Ideas17 February 2025
In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27
13 February 2025
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-2713 February 2025
In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More
Protected: Broadcasting Time: Clock Drawings of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation
12 February 2025
Protected: Broadcasting Time: Clock Drawings of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation12 February 2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank
11 February 2025
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank11 February 2025
Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto
10 February 2025
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 10 February 2025
– Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman
This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More
Lisson 1 + 2
7 February 2025
Lisson 1 + 27 February 2025
LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More
Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees
4 February 2025
Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees4 February 2025
This text is loosely based on the first part of my lecture ‘The Landscape Model,’ delivered at the Sverre Fehn-designed Hedmark Museum in October 2023. The lecture was part of the Sverre Fehn Symposium ‘Authoring Architecture in Time’ organised by AHO and the Hedmark Museum, and curated by Professor Mari… Read More
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter
3 February 2025
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter3 February 2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper
31 January 2025
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper31 January 2025
The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend… Read More
The Grandest Form: Architects on Instruction-Based Art
24 January 2025
The Grandest Form: Architects on Instruction-Based Art24 January 2025
The drawing that we selected for this presentation is, in a way, a limiting of information. We’ve extracted everything but the mechanical systems—the hidden, technical layers in our projects. By focusing only on these systems, we find clues to the instructions and the technical requirements that were handed to us… Read More
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration
23 January 2025
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration23 January 2025
On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events,… Read More
The Utzons go to Stockholm
17 January 2025
The Utzons go to Stockholm17 January 2025
‘…my parents went to visit the grand exhibition in Stockholm in 1930. Here the Scandinavian functionalism had its breakthrough in a society of exceedingly ornate style. Here [in Stockholm] they were exposed to a new and simple, white architecture that drew in light and air, one that let in the… Read More
E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West
13 January 2025
E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West13 January 2025
From this drawing it would seem unlikely that the side elevation at its centre would one day be photographed thousands of times and attract the interest of people from all over the world. It appears unremarkable, especially when compared to the gutsy brick detailing and gothic flourishes of the building’s… Read More
Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop
19 December 2024
Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop19 December 2024
The following text is a brief reflection on two lectures delivered at Shatwell Farm in August 2024 as part of the ENAC EPFL Drawing Research Platform. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read an account of the week, click here. The two lectures at… Read More
Drawing as Signature: Paul Rudolph and the Perspective Section
12 December 2024
Drawing as Signature: Paul Rudolph and the Perspective Section12 December 2024
The following text delves into the drawing of the perspective section—a spatial and structural design tool as well as a specific type of architectural representation—through the drawings of Paul Rudolph, while also reflecting on a post-war Modern era of architectural design-thinking. The text is included in Reassessing Rudolph, ed. by… Read More
The Improvising Bouwmeester,* or: How Raymaekers’ Buildings Got Built
5 December 2024
The Improvising Bouwmeester,* or: How Raymaekers’ Buildings Got Built 5 December 2024
– Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger and James Westcott
The following text first appeared in Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger, and James Westcott, Ad Hoc Baroque: Marcel Raymaekers’ Salvage Architecture in Postwar Belgium (Brussels: Rotor, 2023), 168, 174-178. *Master builder, from the middle ages, responsible for materials, design, construction, workforce, and client liaison.[1] Raymaekers rejected the modern diminution of the architect’s… Read More
Swimming in Pixel Fuzz
28 November 2024
Swimming in Pixel Fuzz28 November 2024
– Will Fu
In 1979, the community of Riehen in Switzerland toured an indoor and outdoor swimming pool proposal by Herzog & de Meuron in the comfort of their private dwellings. Shared as a TV still of a video simulation, the shadowy figures and pliable ceiling surfaces, finished with a grainy wash of… Read More
José Oubrerie, In Memoriam
21 November 2024
José Oubrerie, In Memoriam21 November 2024
Very few contemporary buildings take nearly 50 years to be finished. Just this fact tells us a lot about the intensity, resilience, passion and patience of José Oubrerie, who passed away on March 10th, at 91. Aged only 27 when joining the atelier Le Corbusier in 1959, the church of… Read More
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette
18 November 2024
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette18 November 2024
The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More
On Origins and Originality
15 November 2024
On Origins and Originality15 November 2024
The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and Interpretation in Staging a Museum
11 November 2024
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and Interpretation in Staging a Museum11 November 2024
The following text was first published in OASE #111: Staging the Museum (2022). Drawing Matter would like to thank Tony Fretton and the issue’s editors Aslı Çiçek, Jantje Engels, and Maarten Liefooghe, for allowing us to reproduce the text. Purchase a copy of OASE #111 here. Fuglsang Kunstmuseum is located on the… Read More
Protected: Torrentius, or The Visage of Time
7 February 2025
Protected: Torrentius, or The Visage of Time7 February 2025
– Pierre Chabard
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.