Category: project & building histories
Big Competitions—How to Re-orient the Modern Project for the 21st Century
7 February 2024
Big Competitions—How to Re-orient the Modern Project for the 21st Century7 February 2024
[Intro] [Lead mage] Excerpt— Xaveer de Geyter Excerpt— Mike Guyer Excerpt— Luc Reuse Excerpt— Georges Heintz Excerpt— Marion Goerdt
Protected: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade
7 February 2024
Protected: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade7 February 2024
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury
2 February 2024
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury2 February 2024
– Bill Sherman and Richard Temple
Quoted from the exhibition text of Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus, curated by Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute and Richard Temple, Archivist of the University of London. The exhibition continues until 17 March in the Chancellor’s Hall Lobby, First Floor, Senate House. More information here.… Read More
Simon Fraser University
1 February 2024
Simon Fraser University1 February 2024
This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31 January 2024
Careful Crudeness31 January 2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29 January 2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29 January 2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras
19 January 2024
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras19 January 2024
Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
15 January 2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands15 January 2024
The following text is the third in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed by Kieran from a… Read More
Return to the Archive
12 January 2024
Return to the Archive12 January 2024
In the mellow warmth of September 2023, I, in my capacity as the Director of the Museum of Architecture at the Technical University Berlin, found myself in the unpretentious village of Mikoszewo, Poland. There, where the Vistula River gracefully concludes its journey into the arms of the sea, I stood,… Read More
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction
10 January 2024
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction10 January 2024
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More
Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’
15 December 2023
Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’15 December 2023
The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was one of the most frivolous and lavish events in late-19th-century European history. Erected along the Champs-de-Mars, it encompassed a huge, covered arena surrounded by dozens of pavilions and gardens.[1] It was conceived by Napoleon III to showcase of industrial and technological progress, to promote… Read More
Alberto Ponis, The London Years
14 December 2023
Alberto Ponis, The London Years14 December 2023
I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More