Category: project & building histories
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)
27 October 2020
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)27 October 2020
Excerpted from ‘Architect and Engineer’ 1936 January by William Hamilton.
Qamutit Home
22 October 2020
Qamutit Home22 October 2020
Qamutit (Inuktitut: ᖃᒧᑏᒃ): an Inuit-designed sled for transport on snow and ice. This conceptual sledge-house exhibits a catalogue of ideas and perceptions regarding the notion of ‘home’, dissolving the boundaries between building and environment and between building and meaning. To regard a house as a home is to regard a… Read More
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall
13 October 2020
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall13 October 2020
The following notes were composed by Pierre du Prey to accompany his gift of the sketches pictured above to Drawing Matter, 16 September 2020. The circumstances surrounding two detailed sketches by Raymond Erithof the John Soane gate lodges at Tendring Hall, Suffolk, remain stronglyimpressed on the tablets of my memory.… Read More
The Empire State Building: Elevators (1931)
13 October 2020
The Empire State Building: Elevators (1931)13 October 2020
The following was first published as ‘The Empire State Building: Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Architects: VIII. Elevators’, Architectural Forum (January 1931). Drawing Matter would like to thank Nicholas Olsberg for sending us this text. Digital copies of Architectural Forum’s series on the Empire State Building can be found at usmodernist.org.
Trees Make A Plan
7 October 2020
Trees Make A Plan7 October 2020
The following text is the first of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
Paul László: Hertz Fallout Shelter
31 August 2020
Paul László: Hertz Fallout Shelter31 August 2020
The mid-century architect Paul László knew what it was like to live in uncertain times. He served in both world wars, first for his native land and then for his adopted country. He was Hungarian-born and schooled in Vienna, and his earliest notable achievements were in Germany. László began to… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28 July 2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28 July 2020
– Stan Allen and José Oubrerie
‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’
23 July 2020
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’23 July 2020
The unbuilt half-dome (referred to by the architect as the ‘cupula’) at the Quinta da Malagueira is the subject of a protracted design process that has lasted for over four decades. At the start of 2020, Álvaro Siza sent a drawing of the half-dome to Drawing Matter accompanied by letter… Read More
OMA in Scheveningen
22 July 2020
OMA in Scheveningen22 July 2020
Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More
Venice Biennale (1985)
14 July 2020
Venice Biennale (1985)14 July 2020
The third edition of the Venice Biennale in 1985, ‘Progetto Venezia’, directed by Aldo Rossi, had two major themes: the priority given to the moment of planning and the comparison with the Venetian landscape. For the 1985 exhibition, architects were invited to display their designs for the ‘requalification or the… Read More
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica
7 July 2020
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica7 July 2020
– Paul Cox
My parents Oliver and Jean Cox were devoted ‘Jamaicophiles’, having worked on many projects in the country since the 1960s. One of the most enduring and absorbing was a proposed redevelopment of Port Royal as a renewal and upgrade of the historic city, rebuilding and restoring while making an interesting… Read More
Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)
25 June 2020
Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)25 June 2020
The following text is excerpted from Oppositions 2 (1974): 86–91. The Berlin Building Exposition of 1931 was the largest of its kind ever to be held. With Teutonic thoroughness every material, every method, every theory that had to do with building was shown in the Exposition. The result of this thoroughness, plus… Read More
Soane: Energy and Frustration
24 June 2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24 June 2020
This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More
The Story of the Pool (1978)
19 June 2020
The Story of the Pool (1978)19 June 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… Read More
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views
15 June 2020
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views15 June 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 June 2020
Staging Brancusi15 June 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
Mies: The Horizon
14 June 2020
Mies: The Horizon14 June 2020
Perusing the slides I had taken of the reconstructed pavilion, I found it difficult to decide which way up they went — an artefact of photography, no doubt. Then I changed my mind. It was not an artefact of photography, but a property of the pavilion itself, a property of… Read More
Ove Arup: Engineering the World
12 June 2020
Ove Arup: Engineering the World12 June 2020
My introduction to the work of Ove Arup, the great Anglo-Danish structural engineer whose firm made both the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris buildable, came over the course of three years as I walked, almost every day, across his Kingsgate foot-bridge in Durham. This is the… Read More
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House
12 June 2020
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House12 June 2020
There is no building that tells the social and aesthetic story of Park Lane better than Brook House. From its beginnings as a scrappy country lane (‘Tyburn Lane’) in the eighteenth century, Park Lane rose to become the millionaires’ row of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and went on in… Read More
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti
5 June 2020
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti5 June 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
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)
4 June 2020
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)4 June 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… Read More
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)
1 June 2020
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)1 June 2020
excerpted from The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985)
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer
28 May 2020
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer28 May 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
Trees Move In
22 October 2020
Trees Move In22 October 2020
– Sylvia Lavin
The following text is the second of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
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