Category: project & building histories
Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School
22 March 2023
Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School22 March 2023
This project scrapbook traces the publication and exhibition history of Richard Neutra’s experimental Corona Avenue School, built in 1935 after the Los Angeles earthquake of 1933. The material for this scrapbook has been compiled by Nicholas Olsberg; his earlier text on the school for Drawing Matter can be read here.
Construct
13 March 2023
Construct13 March 2023
In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More
Ghost Parking Lot
10 March 2023
Ghost Parking Lot10 March 2023
SITE, an architecture and environmental art group, was founded in 1970 for the purpose of exploring new ways to bring a heightened level of communication and psychological content to buildings, interiors, and public spaces. Originally organised to research, assemble, and publish international documentation on other artists and architects of similar… Read More
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History
3 March 2023
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History3 March 2023
This paper explores how asphalt became a medium for architects and artists from the late 1950s to the 1970s to raise and articulate questions about memory, oblivion, communication and the environment. It questions to what extent T.J. Demos’ recent assertion that experimental visual culture is embedded ‘within social engagements and… Read More
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff
17 February 2023
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff17 February 2023
This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
9 February 2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)9 February 2023
– Editors
Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
3 February 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work3 February 2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?
2 February 2023
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?2 February 2023
Le Corbusier placed particular emphasis on the notion of freedom. In Où en est l’architecture?, he declares: ‘I accept a poem only if it is made of “words in freedom”’. [1] In the same text, Le Corbusier describes his conception of art as ‘individual manifestation of freedom’. [2] In Sur… Read More
Geography of Hope: John Lautner
31 January 2023
Geography of Hope: John Lautner31 January 2023
This is the second of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Suspension and Poise: Lautner at Mountainside The first photograph of John Lautner that we know, shows him as a boy of about fourteen, standing… Read More
Historic England Image Archive
23 January 2023
Historic England Image Archive23 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk
1 March 2023
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk1 March 2023
– Nicholas Olsberg
This is the final of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More
landscape land