Medium: drawing
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21.02.2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21.02.2022
– Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture
21.02.2022
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture21.02.2022
The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘The Cornice’, GTA Papers 6 (2021). It is one of the outcomes of the work done in preparation for the exhibition The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Architecture and Art, which was on show at the Graphische Sammlung of ETH… Read More
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn
10.02.2022
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn10.02.2022
Extracted, with permission, from Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing edited by Michael Merrill, published by Lars Müller Publishers © 2021. Click here to read a review of this book by Stan Allen. An auspicious meeting: At the end of 1955, a thirty-five-year-old academic named Colin Rowe visited the office… Read More
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing (2021) – Review
10.02.2022
Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing (2021) – Review10.02.2022
I’ll confess, I ordered a copy of this book reluctantly. I had received one of those ‘We think you might be interested…’ notices, but my bookshelves are overburdened, and already include a number of books on Kahn, among them one of Michael Merrill’s previous collaborations with Lars Müller, Louis Kahn:… Read More
Charles Stanley Peach: Pioneer in Power
08.02.2022
Charles Stanley Peach: Pioneer in Power08.02.2022
Charles Stanley Peach set up his architectural practice in 1884, just as the public’s access to electricity was established. Through his contacts in the engineering world, he became involved in designing power supply infrastructure, including Brown Hart Gardens, a substation and Italianate garden in Mayfair. The following excerpt is taken… Read More
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti
07.02.2022
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti07.02.2022
– Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac
The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan
01.02.2022
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan01.02.2022
Writing in Cities of Hope (1993), the historian Conrad Hamann relates that, on mentioning to Robert Venturi the name of the Australian postmodernist architect Peter Corrigan, the first words from Venturi’s mouth were ‘Oh God! Corrigan!’. Yet it must be made clear that to Corrigan, and to his wife and… Read More
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings
31.01.2022
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings31.01.2022
As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe
25.01.2022
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe25.01.2022
Gardens have always been the location to contemplate and speculate on man’s place in nature. Gardens bring the macrocosm into the microcosm by the necessity of being a living place, connecting to the wider rhythms, ecological networks, or the even more abstract forces that create our world. When Charles and… Read More
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam
24.01.2022
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam24.01.2022
The following text is a version of chapter three from Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image by Michael Young, published by Routledge © 2021. Available from Routledge. Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay ‘The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse’ published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches… Read More
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi
19.01.2022
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi19.01.2022
Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 2
12.01.2022
In the Archive: New and Found 212.01.2022
– 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… Read More
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams
12.01.2022
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams12.01.2022
In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems. Fully opaque on its east and west… Read More
Sir John Soane’s Involvement in House Flipping
10.01.2022
Sir John Soane’s Involvement in House Flipping10.01.2022
Any architectural scheme with a lone surviving drawing is likely to be confounding. The lack of graphic context can easily lead to misunderstanding, as was the case for Sir John Soane’s work on 28 Bruton Street. It is my privilege to care for Soane’s drawings collection, and I felt quite… Read More
Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment
06.01.2022
Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment06.01.2022
The following is an excerpt from Fabio Colonnese’s essay, ‘Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment’, published in Digital Modernism Heritage Lexicon (Springer Tracts, 2021). The editors have prefaced this with a short summary of the full essay. The essay describes transparent paper and its operative… Read More
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci
13.12.2021
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci13.12.2021
Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little houseStill neighbors a streamAnd still harbors its arbors Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little homeCooks on the coal cookerThe wood stove’s still blown[…] Where sertão remainsEvery little house is gladfor on the evenings we get our Hail-MaryAnd the pleasure of being alone ‘Casinha feliz’,… Read More
Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter
13.12.2021
Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter13.12.2021
– Adrian Forty, Niall Hobhouse and Philippa Lewis
This film was recorded in the Drawing Matter archive on the afternoon of Friday 28 November. It records a conversation between Philippa Lewis, Adrian Forty and Niall Hobhouse, about some of the drawings behind Philippa’s new book, Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter (2021). The film was… Read More
The Temple of Flora, Stourhead: A Paradise Revisited
09.12.2021
The Temple of Flora, Stourhead: A Paradise Revisited09.12.2021
In 1744 Henry Hoare employed Henry Flitcroft to design a temple for his magnificent Palladian gardens at Stourhead: The Temple of Flora, which was built by William Privett in 1744–5. Excerpted below is an account of the temple’s history taken from Dudley Dodd’s book, Stourhead: Henry Hoare’s Paradise Revisited (2021). Purchase… Read More
Movements of the Drawing Hand
08.12.2021
Movements of the Drawing Hand08.12.2021
How can you study the movements of the drawing hand? Although completed drawings can be interpreted, much the same way graphologists analyse the sequencing and flow of handwriting, can we see an architecture in the movements of the drawing hand? Can we be inside a drawing, and witness, as paper… Read More
Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project
08.12.2021
Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project08.12.2021
This drawing of the roof level of a fire station, designed as a student work in 1986, was for the ‘Analoge Architektur’ exhibition at the Architektur Forum Zurich. [1] While the drawing is the work of an individual, it was inconceivable without the competitive and collegial development of a drawing… Read More
Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 1
06.12.2021
Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 106.12.2021
The following text is extracted, with permission, from Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric and Oblique Drawings by Ray Lucas, published by Routledge © 2020. Available here. Drawing Parallels explores the uses of parallel projection in the work of five twentieth century architects: James Stirling, JJP Oud, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk,… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found
01.12.2021
In the Archive: New and Found01.12.2021
– 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 On the digital planchest this time is… Read More
Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. Seeing the Detail
14.02.2022
Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. Seeing the Detail14.02.2022
– Mikael Bergquist
In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the concept of ‘the Punctum’. The Punctum is something in a photograph that etches itself in the consciousness of the viewer. It is often a small detail that evokes emotions long after the gaze has left the picture: an experience that is born in the viewer’s… Read More
detail