Template, Marilyn Monroe Drafting Aid – A New Concept in Curves, 1956. Perspex, with printed envelope, envelope 157 × 258 mm, curve 110 × 214 mm. DMC 3907.
By the 1950s, a generation of architectural draughtsmen had abandoned their Beaux Arts ‘curves’ for the rulers and set squares of High Modernism; they had to be tempted back, by whatever means, to drawing the irregular curves that were both a possibility—and a feature—of the new architecture of structural concrete.
Here are some examples from the collection at Drawing Matter. They take us through Zaha Hadid’s office in the late 1980s and include our new Marilyn Monroe-shaped acquisition…
Left and right: French curve and curve in the shape of a woman’s body from Jeremy Peacock’s drawing box (DMC 3870); centre: ship curve used by Michael Wolfson in Zaha Hadid’s office, 1980s (DMC 3073.1).French curves and curves in the shape of a woman’s body from Jeremy Peacock’s drawing box (DMC 3870); Marilyn Monroe Drafting Aid (DMC 3907).Larger ship curves from Jeremy Peacock’s drawing box (DMC 3870)
