Category: project & building histories
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica
07.07.2020
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica07.07.2020
– 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)
25.06.2020
Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)25.06.2020
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
24.06.2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24.06.2020
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)
19.06.2020
The Story of the Pool (1978)19.06.2020
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
15.06.2020
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
Mies: The Horizon
14.06.2020
Mies: The Horizon14.06.2020
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
12.06.2020
Ove Arup: Engineering the World12.06.2020
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
12.06.2020
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House12.06.2020
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
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
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)
04.06.2020
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)04.06.2020
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)
01.06.2020
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)01.06.2020
excerpted from The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985)
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
Eisenman: House VI (1985)
21.05.2020
Eisenman: House VI (1985)21.05.2020
The design of House VI was partly the result of Eisenman’s attempt to reconcile linguistic theories with architectural design. His interest in the work of Noam Chomsky, especially his theories of syntax, led to the investigation of possible analogies between language and architecture, and particularly the syntactic aspects of architectural… Read More
Hotel Sphinx (1978)
18.05.2020
Hotel Sphinx (1978)18.05.2020
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
L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)
14.05.2020
L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)14.05.2020
As part of an imagined intervention in the subterranean spaces of the redeveloped Les Halles, Jean Criton’s project describes the new Metro station invaded, in a sinister process of parthenogenesis, by the meat from the Pavillon de la Boucherie, which had stood on the site until its controversial demolition eight… 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
Wright & Lautner: The Divorce
12.05.2020
Wright & Lautner: The Divorce12.05.2020
Wright’s Eaglefeather (1941) – hilltop Malibu extravaganza for the filmmaker Arch Oboler – was running into trouble. Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, oversaw construction drawings and supervision, but Lloyd was fired by Oboler in March 1941. Wright came to Los Angeles and arranged for Lautner to complete the project… Read More
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper
30.04.2020
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper30.04.2020
This scrap of paper, perhaps scooped up from the floor or a waste basket in Louis Kahn’s studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, shows a single sketch – spidery lines outlining a modest block and strange openings. Beginning drawing in 1958 Kahn searched for a design of a new building… Read More
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension
28.04.2020
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension28.04.2020
The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More
Venice Biennale (1985)
14.07.2020
Venice Biennale (1985)14.07.2020
– Dario Passi
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
public space DMC presentation theoretical & imaginary exhibition urban form