Category: project & building histories
Loggia Mercato Nuovo, Florence
27.02.2017
Loggia Mercato Nuovo, Florence27.02.2017
A few blocks north of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence one finds the loggia of Mercato Nuovo (1546–51), a rectangular edifice three bays wide and four bays deep, built under Cosimo I de’ Medici. It was constructed as part of a program meant to bolster the trade of gold and silk… Read More
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland
23.02.2017
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland23.02.2017
George Wilkinson (1813/4–1890) was an English architect employed by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1839 to facilitate the construction of workhouses throughout Ireland in response to growing numbers of homeless poor. While historians have written of the Poor Laws and the workhouses, Wilkinson’s contribution to both merits further study in… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc
17.02.2017
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc17.02.2017
This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More
Superstudio: Cinematography
30.01.2017
Superstudio: Cinematography30.01.2017
It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More
Heathrow Airport Project
25.01.2017
Heathrow Airport Project25.01.2017
These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… Read More
Pier Leone Ghezzi
20.01.2017
Pier Leone Ghezzi20.01.2017
This drawing by the Roman artist Ghezzi depicts an unusual funerary monument, commissioned by the Sacchetti family for their beloved donkey called ‘Grillo’ (Cricket). According to the extensive inscription, this clever and loyal animal regularly carried baskets all alone from central Rome to the Sacchetti’s Villa Pigneto, ten kilometres away.… Read More
Black Airground
23.12.2016
Black Airground23.12.2016
The following text is extracted from the Jeffrey Shaw Compendium. For Black Airground the artists – Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller – positioned three black military surplus parachutes in a row on the floor of the gallery in the Oxford Museum of Art, entirely filling the exhibition space. Weighted around their… Read More
Brunswick Centre
05.12.2016
Brunswick Centre05.12.2016
It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23.11.2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23.11.2016
Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More
A Public Convenience
18.11.2016
A Public Convenience18.11.2016
Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More
Charles Percier
18.11.2016
Charles Percier18.11.2016
Design for a Samovar The drawing is preparatory for the samovar in silver-gilt, eventually executed in 1808 by Henry Auguste for Queen Hortense (Les Grands Orfevres de Louis XIII a Charles X, Paris 1965, p. 273). The piece bears the marks of the years 1795–8, and 1798–1809. The design was… Read More
Louis Bricard
08.11.2016
Louis Bricard08.11.2016
The Dominican monastery in the centre of the city of Laval on the Loire was seized during the first year of the Revolution, while an expansion was in construction, and then acquired by the regional government as its seat of administration. In 1803 the medieval cloister and chapel were demolished… Read More
Paul Robbrecht
02.11.2016
Paul Robbrecht02.11.2016
Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More
Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project
18.09.2016
Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project18.09.2016
– Alex Bank and Sam Casswell
The Garden Rooms academy drawing by Casswell Bank Architect’s is a depiction of the relationship between the new shed, the Maltings buildings and its gardens located at the western edge of Bruton. The drawing extends beyond the adjacent road connecting the town with the countryside and the river Brue that… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
01.08.2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation01.08.2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad
12.05.2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12.05.2016
Published in 1970, fourteen years after the first Playboy Pad of 1956, and with ‘a new decade dawning’, this penthouse design by Robert Bray was presented as ‘the pinnacle of urban living’, combining ‘the latest technological and architectural advances with an idea as old as the hills’: Roman houses that were built… Read More
The Birth of the Column
07.04.2016
The Birth of the Column07.04.2016
The following text is excepted from an interview with Kate Goodwin, in: Sensing Spaces, Architecture Reimagined, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. All drawings are by Álvaro Siza, 2013–2014, for the design, placement and installation of three columns in precast yellow concrete, first in the courtyard of Burlington House and then in… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18.03.2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18.03.2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
Michael Webb: Sin Centre
05.12.2015
Michael Webb: Sin Centre05.12.2015
The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More
Ville Spatiale
20.11.2015
Ville Spatiale20.11.2015
The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More
Paolo Soleri
22.02.2017
Paolo Soleri22.02.2017
– Tim Abrahams
Over an advertisement for a series of workshops in the Arizona desert in 1979 ran the legend: ‘Soleri is in the desert not to escape the city for some pastoral dream but to create a wholly new urban civilization.’ It is not known when he started referring to himself in… Read More
topographic/cartographic publication theoretical & imaginary urban form DMC