Medium: drawing
Behind the Lines 13
10.10.2019
Behind the Lines 1310.10.2019
I selected a distant meadow in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself…. No sooner was the house completed than I knew it was not far enough away from everything I wished to leave behind…Later I sold the house and grounds for… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10.10.2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10.10.2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea
07.10.2019
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea07.10.2019
Signora Onvoloni, here is a drawing that might find a place in your cabinet of ideas: ‘a drawing is an idea’ – Gio Ponti, translated by Guido Beltramini [1] All seems simple enough on the face of it, and of course one smiles, just as Gio hoped we might. But… Read More
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image
03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image opened at the RIBA’s Heinz Gallery on 8 October 1975 and ran until 29 November. The exhibition was a drawings show of mostly unbuilt works and Price was at once the subject, designer and organiser. Writing in the Architects’ Journal, Sutherland Lyall, the journal’s building editor,… Read More
Behind the Lines 12
23.09.2019
Behind the Lines 1223.09.2019
1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23.09.2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23.09.2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21.09.2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21.09.2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19.09.2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19.09.2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Living in Colour
17.09.2019
Living in Colour17.09.2019
Since 1963, when I left London to work and stay in Sardinia, I kept and still keep a yearly agenda/diary, one day for a page, to note the place where I am, the weather, the appointments, the site visits and the other sort of events of some interest. These are… Read More
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’
23.08.2019
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’23.08.2019
The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22.08.2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22.08.2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan
19.08.2019
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan19.08.2019
This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More
Learning from the Tortoise
09.08.2019
Learning from the Tortoise09.08.2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
The Matter of Drawing
03.08.2019
The Matter of Drawing03.08.2019
The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption
02.07.2019
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption02.07.2019
My first experience with video art happened by chance. After obtaining an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I joined Lawrence Halprin & Associates, an architectural firm in San Francisco that specialised in the planning of urban spaces and then conveying, through varying means of visual communication, such ideas… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types
26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types26.06.2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More
Halsey Ricardo
22.06.2019
Halsey Ricardo22.06.2019
Early in 1916, RIBA president Halsey Ricardo reported on an acquisition that, when added to the works of Bibiena, Palladio, Jones and Wren, would begin to build a more continuous corpus of the drawn history of architecture. [1] This was a large set of sketchbooks and project drawings ‘from a… Read More
Behind the Lines 10
19.06.2019
Behind the Lines 1019.06.2019
It was undoubtedly the doing of that ancient buffer Lutyens, Samuel Hardy reflected sourly, as he stared at the pages of the September 1932 issue of The Builder and saw an illustration of the winning entry. It showed Mr Edward H Banks of ‘Villa Desiré’, Downlands Road, Purley, Surrey’s awful concoction of… Read More
On Cornices, Part I
17.06.2019
On Cornices, Part I17.06.2019
In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974
05.04.2019
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 197405.04.2019
This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… Read More
Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984
14.03.2019
Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 198414.03.2019
I arrived in Rafael Moneo’s Madrid office in early 1984. I had graduated from Cooper Union two years earlier and spent 18 months working for Richard Meier in New York. I met Moneo in 1978 when he was teaching at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but I don’t… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm
08.03.2019
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm08.03.2019
This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More
Tales from the Crypt
18.10.2019
Tales from the Crypt18.10.2019
– Stephen Bayley
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
civic & municipal public space construction drawing DMC Soane and Modernism section