Medium: collage

Porto School, B Side: Insurrectional Organization of Space

Porto School, B Side: Insurrectional Organization of Space

Pedro Bandeira

The following text on Mário Ramos and Fernando Barroso’s student work at the Porto School is excerpted from the publication Porto School, B Side 1968–1978 (An Oral History) (CIAJG & Documenta, 2014). Collages from the project are included in the exhibition At Play at Garagem Sul, Centro Cultural de Belém… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material

Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material

Rebecca Disney

This is a narrative of listening: listening to materials, processes, place and self. When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment – you perceive, touch, and smell its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently, you register the space that surrounds you. During the initial… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Ying Xuan Chian

Prologue: Panic! at K’s office Location: K’s office, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower Characters: Tutor: K (calm, knowing) Student: Me (facing an existential crisis, encountering a creative block, second-year hysteria… you get the idea) Brief: To design a library  I am fascinated by the heterogeneity of our experience of built… Read More

An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)

An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)

Gustav Metzger

The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More

Superstudio: Finding the Horizon

Superstudio: Finding the Horizon

Gian Piero Frassinelli

Until not too long ago, I would be asked to explain to youngsters accustomed to digital graphics how I used to make montages. I felt like an archaeologist, explaining how, in the Palaeolithic era, Neanderthals used to make their tools.  Across several workshops, I have realised that the techniques today… Read More

Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House

Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House

James Gowan, J. M. Richards, Laurent Stalder, James Stirling and Ellis Woodman

This first impetus for this article was provided by Laurent Stalder’s discussion of the sectional perspective drawing for the Isle of Wight house, reproduced here, which led us to J. M. Richards’ seminal essay, and then onward through the literature. In addition, we asked the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Canadian… Read More

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Luca Galofaro

Our vision is simultaneously determined by the (past) historical structure of the work and by the present structure of the gaze that examines it, in which the accumulated glimpses of history often continue to operate.– Daniel Arasse Writing a postcard is the simplest thing in the world. Among other things,… Read More

Drawing the Brunswick Centre

Drawing the Brunswick Centre

Birkin Haward

In the 1960s, when I was a penniless AA student, I used to produce perspective drawings for various offices to help pay the rent. Among them were the Smithsons, for whom I did several of the Economist, mainly interiors; Colquhoun and Miller, the chemistry building at Holloway College; YRM and… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Grace Mortlock and David Neustein

This is the fifthteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio talks to Grace Mortlock and David Neustein of the Sydney-based practice Other Architects… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Tatiana Bilbao and Fabrizio Gallanti

This is the thirteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Fabrizio interviews Tatiana Bilbao about her teaching at Yale School of Architecture and… Read More

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Ciaran Scannell

The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More

Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’

Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’

Suzaan Boettger

The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life.  Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More

Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation

Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation

Daniel Innes

Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More

Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique

Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique

Rebecca Siefert

The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More

Architecture’s Mirror Stage

Architecture’s Mirror Stage

Michael Abrahamson

Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample

This is the seventh in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More

Superstudio: Another Mirror Image

Superstudio: Another Mirror Image

Ludwig Engel

Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

Nicholas Logsdail

A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein

Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein

Fabrizio Gallanti and Emily Wettstein

This is the sixth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Emily Wettstein, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University GSD. The… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

Fabrizio Gallanti and Andrés Jaque

This is the fifth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Andrés Jaque, founder of the Office for Political Innovation… Read More

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Cameron Lintott

When the ‘hard-line drawing’ has become so synonymous with the image of the architect it is easy to forget that the convenience of the everyday pen is relatively recent. For most of the long history of the world’s second-oldest profession, pen, paint and ink were reserved for competition boards or… Read More

Echo: SuperStudio & Hans Hollein

Echo: SuperStudio & Hans Hollein

Matt Page

Superstudio: Monument Interrupted

Superstudio: Monument Interrupted

Julian Lewis

The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More

Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)

Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)

Philip Johnson

The following text is excerpted from Oppositions 2 (1974): 86–91. The Berlin Building Exposition of 1931 was the largest of its kind ever to be held. With Teutonic thoroughness every material, every method, every theory that had to do with building was shown in the Exposition. The result of this thoroughness, plus… Read More