– Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge.

The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before.

New

Julia Bloomfield recalls a dinner with Frank Gehry at a Chinese restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica, where he drew a project he was working on in Seoul (which we are still trying to identify) onto a napkin. In an email to Drawing Matter, Julia writes ‘I seem to remember that he thought that the project would not be built’. Also new to the collection are albums of engineering drawings by two French student architects known only by surname: Baraud and Toupet; and glass negatives of models of temples in Jerusalem by architect, archaeologist and Protestant missionary, Conrad Schick. On the planchest is a shot of Solomon’s Temple, also known as the First Temple. It stood on Mount Moriah for almost 400 years until it was destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who was famously depicted crawling around on his hands and knees by William Blake.

Found

Call us Saint Peter, because this month we are the custodians of ‘gates’. In the library we found The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy, which documents Hardy’s parallel and lesser-known career as an architect. [1] The snippets above show his drawings of a wooden gate, a page of moulding details, and the calculation of sun angles, made sometime between 1862 and 1872. Around twenty years later Hardy returned to architecture to design and build Max Gate, his house on the outskirts of Dorset. It was here that he wrote some of his best-known novels. Next to Hardy is a drawing by Michael Gold titled ‘Gateway to Mecca’, a design for a Ceremonial Arch over the highway from Jeddah, nine miles from Mecca. The drawings were submitted to the city authorities and for royal assent in Saudi Arabia in 1979.

Notes

1. Published by the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society in 1966.