Category: project & building histories
Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum
22 March 2024
Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum22 March 2024
You can stand on the balcony of Philip Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum today and see the same view of Fort Worth that Helmut Jacoby drew up in 1960. Not much has changed. Apart from the fanciful New-Mexican art in the foreground (his invention), the same hot Texan sun, the same… Read More
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things
4 March 2024
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things4 March 2024
‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.
29 February 2024
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.29 February 2024
– Felicia Liang and William Wikström
Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More
Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault
28 February 2024
Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault28 February 2024
If you really want to hear about where to find the mountain vaults of Swiss banks, and what they look like, the first thing you should probably know is that the archives vigilantly kept by almost all banks in Switzerland are not publicly accessible—and even when they are, the last thing… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
12 February 2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands12 February 2024
The following text is the fourth 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… Read More
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
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
4 December 2023
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands4 December 2023
The following text is the second 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… Read More
Guy Debord—An Art of War
29 November 2023
Guy Debord—An Art of War29 November 2023
– Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy
The following is an extract from the book Emmanuel Guy, Laurence Le Bras, and Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Guy Debord: Un Art de La Guerre (Editions Gallimard, 2013), pp. 92–96 published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Guy Debord: an art of war’, presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand… Read More
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial
20 November 2023
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial20 November 2023
In 2001, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) acquired at auction an item described in the catalogue as ‘Architectural Drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park’. The unsigned, undated drawing is a perspective view of an obelisk, the base of which is a four-faced distyle Doric temple. This… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m going to get medieval on your ass!
16 November 2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m going to get medieval on your ass!16 November 2023
‘I’m going to get medieval on your ass!’ Any analogy between the hefty massing of the middle-ages and soi-disant Brutalism is here revived in the bold metal hinges of our garage door, worthy of some château fort. Likewise the solid lead parapet of the roof could well guard a fortress, if also reminiscent of the… Read More
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers
9 November 2023
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers9 November 2023
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The Manufacture of architecture: Joseph Paxton and the development of the Great Stove
9 November 2023
The Manufacture of architecture: Joseph Paxton and the development of the Great Stove9 November 2023
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. Joseph… Read More
Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building
8 November 2023
Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building8 November 2023
This polychrome mosaic, discovered in 1872 in Rome near Termini train station, is the only mosaic depiction of a plan of a bath building known from the Roman period. Only three fragments were recovered, representing less than five percent of the original mosaic whose dimensions approximated 3.40 x 5.70 m. Two… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
18 March 2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands18 March 2024
– Kieran Hawkins
The following text is the fifth and final 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… Read More
domestic connor street: made by many hands (series)