Category: project & building histories
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer
6 February 2020
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer6 February 2020
– Tony Fretton and Sarah Handelman
Sometimes you make drawings to tell yourself the project is going okay. Well, that’s what I do. This drawing came quite late in the design of the first Lisson Gallery. In the way I used to work, you would reach a point where you’d have a very thorough sense of… Read More
La Casa Della Falsita
5 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita5 February 2020
The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
8 January 2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino8 January 2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer
2 January 2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer2 January 2020
Towards the end of my architectural studies in the late 1960s I moved into a little house near the Prinsenhof neighbourhood of Ghent. My neighbours were Ghent people, and my landlord owned the whole block. Every month he would collect rent, and although he didn’t talk to most people, he… Read More
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments
9 December 2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments9 December 2019
The following text was first published in 1977 in an issue of AD Profiles dedicated to the Millbank Housing Competition. Run by the Crown Estate, the competition to develop a site adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge attracted nearly five hundred entries, including proposals from Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,… Read More
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche
13 November 2019
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche13 November 2019
Count Harry Kessler – the German aristocrat, publisher, patron and friend of seemingly everyone in the European avant-garde – had long had in mind a worthy monument to his idol, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose seventieth birthday would be celebrated on 15 October 1914. Beginning in February 1911, Kessler began sending letters… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
7 November 2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson7 November 2019
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.1955
7 November 2019
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.19557 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
What Lies Beneath
31 October 2019
What Lies Beneath31 October 2019
‘The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be,’ recalled Mark Twain in his 1897 Following the Equator. The travelogue was the result of an 1895 lecture tour that Twain, by then 60, had made of the British Empire… Read More
Tales from the crypt
18 October 2019
Tales from the crypt18 October 2019
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10 October 2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10 October 2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23 September 2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23 September 2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21 September 2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21 September 2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… Read More
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan
19 August 2019
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan19 August 2019
This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More
Learning from the tortoise
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption
2 July 2019
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption2 July 2019
My first experience with video art happened by chance. After obtaining an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I joined Lawrence Halprin & Associates, an architectural firm in San Francisco that specialised in the planning of urban spaces and then conveying, through varying means of visual communication, such ideas… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types
26 June 2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types26 June 2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More
On Cornices, Part I
17 June 2019
On Cornices, Part I17 June 2019
In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More
Ugliness and Judgment
19 April 2019
Ugliness and Judgment19 April 2019
In the summer of 1740, John Wood the Elder ventured his first study of the lithic monuments that surrounded his native city of Bath, drawing sketches of the stones at Stanton Drew. These earned him the patronage of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, which enabled Wood to undertake more… Read More
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974
5 April 2019
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 19745 April 2019
This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm
8 March 2019
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm8 March 2019
This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More
Gowan and Stirling
1 March 2019
Gowan and Stirling1 March 2019
This odd-shaped, yellowed analysis drawing by James Gowan, drawn directly onto heavy paper isn’t dated, and was probably added to years after the drawing was nearly complete. Ellis Woodman describes the drawing as ‘that drawing that James always kept in the box with his sketchbooks’. Unusually, when I first saw… Read More
Battersea Redevelopment
22 January 2020
Battersea Redevelopment22 January 2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
industry & infrastructure DMC sketch concept & diagram theoretical & imaginary