Category: project & building histories

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Construct

Richard Hall

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

Ghost Parking Lot

James Wines

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

DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History

Nicholas Boyarsky

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: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

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

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Ivo Martins

In the photograph on the left from 1939, found in the municipal digital archive, Porto’s civic centre is still under construction. The image captures half-paved new roads, with curious people milling around the freshly built City Hall. Viewing this photograph recalls the collages of Fernando Barroso and Mário Ramos, where… Read More

Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)

Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)

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

W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work

Hugh Strange

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?

Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?

Marianna Charitonidou

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

Geography of Hope: John Lautner

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Historic England Image Archive

Arthur Prior-Palmer

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