Category: project & building histories
The Garden of Earthly Delights
09.04.2020
The Garden of Earthly Delights09.04.2020
The essay is an excerpt from Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, by Hamed Khosravi, published by Hatje Cantz. Pre-order through the publisher’s website or visiting www.guevrekian.org.
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)
08.04.2020
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)08.04.2020
Sixteen swim in synchrony. Bright red trunks, blue swim caps, in a perfectly choreographed 4 x 4 grid of bodies in motion. They swim in the shallow pale blue pool that contains them, as it floats in the ocean. They are about to collide with a dock that is too… Read More
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer
07.04.2020
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer07.04.2020
In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More
Where Words Fail
06.04.2020
Where Words Fail06.04.2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Web of Intrigue
03.04.2020
Web of Intrigue03.04.2020
Searching the internet for the drawings of Michael Sorkin, one comes across a lengthy list of the projects that have emerged from his eponymously titled studio. Halfway down the list can be found an exotic beauty of a drawing soberly captioned thus: House of the Future. 1999. Coloured Pencil, Hand… Read More
Gowan on the English House
01.04.2020
Gowan on the English House01.04.2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30.03.2020
Houses of Work and Play30.03.2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art
27.03.2020
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art27.03.2020
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built
20.03.2020
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built20.03.2020
There are several curiosities in the plan of this classic modernist house by Richard Neutra. First, more area is allowed for dogs than for music. Second, there is a two-car garage, but a separate parking-space for a Rolls-Royce. Here is fine discrimination. But fine discrimination is exactly what you would… Read More
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)
09.03.2020
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)09.03.2020
Alvar Aalto, from an interview for the Swedish newspaper Åbo Underrättelser, May 22, 1930. Reprinted in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: Sketches, trans. Stuart Wrede (London: MIT Press, 1979), 16.
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building
06.03.2020
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building06.03.2020
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
05.03.2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)05.03.2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library
07.02.2020
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library07.02.2020
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer
06.02.2020
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer06.02.2020
– 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
05.02.2020
La Casa Della Falsita05.02.2020
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
08.01.2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino08.01.2020
– 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
02.01.2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer02.01.2020
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
09.12.2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments09.12.2019
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
13.11.2019
Henry van de Velde and a Monument to Nietzsche13.11.2019
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
07.11.2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson07.11.2019
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
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
01.11.2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek01.11.2019
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
Battersea Redevelopment
22.01.2020
Battersea Redevelopment22.01.2020
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.
sketch concept & diagram theoretical & imaginary industry & infrastructure DMC