Category: project & building histories
Construct
13.03.2023
Construct13.03.2023
In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More
Ghost Parking Lot
10.03.2023
Ghost Parking Lot10.03.2023
SITE, an architecture and environmental art group, was founded in 1970 for the purpose of exploring new ways to bring a heightened level of communication and psychological content to buildings, interiors, and public spaces. Originally organised to research, assemble, and publish international documentation on other artists and architects of similar… Read More
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History
03.03.2023
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History03.03.2023
This paper explores how asphalt became a medium for architects and artists from the late 1950s to the 1970s to raise and articulate questions about memory, oblivion, communication and the environment. It questions to what extent T.J. Demos’ recent assertion that experimental visual culture is embedded ‘within social engagements and… Read More
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff
17.02.2023
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff17.02.2023
This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
09.02.2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)09.02.2023
– Editors
Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
03.02.2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work03.02.2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?
02.02.2023
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?02.02.2023
Le Corbusier placed particular emphasis on the notion of freedom. In Où en est l’architecture?, he declares: ‘I accept a poem only if it is made of “words in freedom”’. [1] In the same text, Le Corbusier describes his conception of art as ‘individual manifestation of freedom’. [2] In Sur… Read More
Geography of Hope: John Lautner
31.01.2023
Geography of Hope: John Lautner31.01.2023
This is the second of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Suspension and Poise: Lautner at Mountainside The first photograph of John Lautner that we know, shows him as a boy of about fourteen, standing… Read More
Historic England Image Archive
23.01.2023
Historic England Image Archive23.01.2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
DMJ – Dialogues between Architecture And Granite in Punta Sardegna
20.01.2023
DMJ – Dialogues between Architecture And Granite in Punta Sardegna20.01.2023
The stones are also premonitions, and the trails chart a course through nature that is both sign and path, direction and culture. The human journey and the mystery of the eternal, chance and intervention. Thus, the pre-existing stones are added and mingle with those put in later, and vice versa,… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education
13.01.2023
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education13.01.2023
This is the fourth text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. The building sites of London in the late nineteenth century desperately lacked adequate skills, and this need was being addressed neither on the job nor through appropriate training. The first prospectus of… Read More
The ESB’s New Clothes
12.01.2023
The ESB’s New Clothes12.01.2023
In 1965 sixteen late-eighteenth-century houses on the east side of Fitzwilliam Street Lower, Dublin were demolished. They had served as headquarters of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and in their place was to be a new company HQ, a 1961 competition-winning scheme by the partnership of Sam Stephenson and Arthur… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III
06.01.2023
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III06.01.2023
This is the final of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as a young architect in London and Dorset. As he… Read More
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair
05.01.2023
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair05.01.2023
Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part II
21.12.2022
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part II21.12.2022
This is the second of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies, that we will publish over the next few weeks; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I
12.12.2022
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I12.12.2022
This is the first of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies, that we will publish over the next few weeks; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as… Read More
DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth
09.12.2022
DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth09.12.2022
What does the inside of the earth sound like? Do continental margins have a signature key? Does magma whistle? These questions preoccupied the scientist Frank Perret in the early 20th century as he sought to develop the new science of volcanology. For Perret, though, listening to the earth was not… Read More
DMJ – ‘All the varieties of Nature’s works under ground’: the Geological Imagination of Alexander Pope
09.12.2022
DMJ – ‘All the varieties of Nature’s works under ground’: the Geological Imagination of Alexander Pope09.12.2022
In 1739, the English poet Alexander Pope transformed his grotto – a subterranean passage that used to consist of a cryptoporticus with architectural orders – into ‘a mine’. Minerals were encrusted into the walls in a manner that imitated those found underground. Previous scholars have considered this to be a… Read More
Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília
30.11.2022
Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília30.11.2022
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21.11.2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21.11.2022
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House
18.11.2022
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House18.11.2022
Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More
Queensway, Hong Kong
04.11.2022
Queensway, Hong Kong04.11.2022
What I knew of Hong Kong before I moved here came from film and photography. It was a dense, post-modern city that in earlier decades had been characterised by its economic success. Since the turn of the century, the city has been pummelled by shocks and anxieties. Life in Hong… Read More
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk
01.03.2023
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk01.03.2023
– Nicholas Olsberg
This is the final of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More
DMC landscape land