Category: project & building histories
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House
23 December 2017
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House23 December 2017
Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More
Anthony Salvin
18 December 2017
Anthony Salvin18 December 2017
As Torquay expanded in the mid-nineteenth century with the town’s prominence as a seaside retreat and a connection to the South Devon railway made in 1848, new churches were built to accommodate the increased number of parishioners and seasonal visitors. Whilst construction of the new church of St Mary Magdalene… Read More
William Butterfield
6 December 2017
William Butterfield6 December 2017
Nothing Permitted But What Has Been Foreseen William Butterfield eschewed the illustrative perspective, preferring instead to develop even his studies as contract drawings that would serve three tasks: as presentations through which a project could be comprehended, as instructions from which his contractors and clients could not swerve, and as… Read More
Assemble: Collective Authorship
18 November 2017
Assemble: Collective Authorship18 November 2017
– Giles Smith and Adam Willis
Assemble’s practice was established in 2010 through a collective desire to build together, and our first projects were largely designed on site as we went. Our practice has been and remains organised cooperatively, without hierarchy, and our design methodologies have been developed to accommodate that particular dynamic. We use large-scale… Read More
Alvar Aalto’s city
1 November 2017
Alvar Aalto’s city1 November 2017
For whatever reason it is produced, a blueprint solidifies a moment in the design process and further solidifies the project. It is not necessarily the final moment, and often after the blueprints have been produced they might be annotated by one or the other master, resulting in new drawings from… Read More
The Clandeboye Drawings
27 October 2017
The Clandeboye Drawings27 October 2017
The seven Clandeboye drawings, each 35 × 35 cm and on A2 trace, were produced in 1984. The year is significant. Then the AA was busy maintaining a posture of indifference to Jenksian postmodernism, while the possibly visionary (at least in the case of architectural speculation) and certainly introspective 1970s… Read More
Blind Spots
20 October 2017
Blind Spots20 October 2017
Architectural drawing is a strange and powerful tool. It is simultaneously a means of depiction and a way of constructing the world. That’s why, beyond the conventions of practice, the politics of the architectural image remain so significant. The drawing is the world we construct: its own ideas of subject, its modes… Read More
Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House
12 October 2017
Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House12 October 2017
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
This photograph was made of a physical model as part of the ongoing process of working on the design. It was made to test the scale and dimensions of the various elements that make up the space of one of two large rooms within the ‘Stage House’, a small shed… Read More
Peter Smithson: Obelisk
12 October 2017
Peter Smithson: Obelisk12 October 2017
Peter Smithson’s influence predates slightly that of Cedric Price. It has also migrated to Shatwell, most notably in the recent re-erection of his wooden obelisk that first stood at Hadspen, commanding the view across the countryside. At Shatwell the obelisk takes on a more urban role (the design was originally… Read More
Cedric Price: FIR Project
12 October 2017
Cedric Price: FIR Project12 October 2017
Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More
Stephen Taylor: Urban Rural
12 October 2017
Stephen Taylor: Urban Rural12 October 2017
The existing enclave of Shatwell Farm has seen a slow decline in its agricultural industry over recent decades, rendering many of its buildings derelict and redundant. The project is seen as part of a process to revitalise the farmstead at Shatwell. Whilst dairy farming is expected to continue and its… Read More
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot
5 October 2017
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot5 October 2017
This drawing depicts a site-specific public art project, commissioned by the retail developer David Burmant, which entombed twenty junked cars under a layer of asphalt in a suburban shopping plaza. James Wines was interested in upending expectations about common iconographic elements of suburbia by inverting the relationship between such objects… Read More
Hugh Strange: the Archive
22 September 2017
Hugh Strange: the Archive22 September 2017
Hugh Strange has been involved in the transformations of Shatwell farmyard since 2010. He first entered the conversation as client advisor for an Architecture Research Unit project for a new Gardener’s House on the Hadspen Estate. Although the house was never built, the presence of ARU acted as a catalyst to several living… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Sense Making
22 September 2017
Álvaro Siza: Sense Making22 September 2017
Álvaro Siza’s influence begins with the move of the Drawings Collection to Shatwell in 2012. In the same year Stephen Taylor Architects completed the Cowshed and Hugh Strange Architects completed the Archive building. Well known for his seminal Quinta da Malagueira housing estate (1973–1977) in Evora, Portugal, Siza appreciated the scale of… Read More
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu
7 September 2017
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu7 September 2017
One cannot see these drawings without seeing the mural by Sol LeWitt, in which an electrician has subsequently installed doorbells and a light switch. The mural is in the entrance hall of a city palace that was for a time the entrance to a gallery. When the gallery stopped its… Read More
The Drawing as Actor
5 September 2017
The Drawing as Actor5 September 2017
In two publications about post-war reconstruction, How should we rebuild London? (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1945) and Die Stalinallee Nationales Aufbauprogramme (Verlag Der Nation Berlin, 1952), the planning ferment in London and Berlin becomes a performance in itself, revealed through the choice of the media and subjects which they each adopt for illustration.… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22 July 2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22 July 2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
4 May 2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer4 May 2017
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
Permanence
18 April 2017
Permanence18 April 2017
Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More
Drawings in Conversation
1 September 2017
Drawings in Conversation1 September 2017
– Matthew Wells
C. R. Cockerell, Joseph Gwilt and the Royal Exchange Competition Owing to a faulty gas lamp, on the 10th January 1838 the Royal Exchange in the City of London was destroyed by fire. The loss of the building was seen to be potentially catastrophic for trade in the City and… Read More
commerce interior section projection (axonometric isometric) presentation publication