Medium: drawing
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons
5 February 2018
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons5 February 2018
In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, architect Charles Edward Bassett, the design lead in SOM’s San Francisco office, was asked by Betty J. Blum how architectural education changed in the US when modernism became accepted in architectural schools and the Beaux-Arts tradition side-lined. What happened when the… Read More
Shatwell DrawingScape
29 January 2018
Shatwell DrawingScape29 January 2018
This year a group of 12 students from the Intermediate School at the Architectural Association, London, are developing proposals for the Shatwell site. They take inspiration from the Drawing Matter collection to create exhibition spaces to display and celebrate the culture of drawing. The work ranges from speculative interpretations of… Read More
Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals
25 January 2018
Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals25 January 2018
The following text is excerpted from an interview with Hans Van der Laan and Antoine Bodar, broadcast by Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), 24 December 1988. Given that we have reduced architecture to proportions – to a matter of measurements, which is akin to solving a mathematical problem, the design has not been created visually. This… Read More
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19 January 2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19 January 2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing
14 January 2018
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing14 January 2018
The idea of using tape drawings originated for climatic reasons: India goes through a five-month monsoon season each year, and during this time it is very humid. For us this meant that the drawings we were producing, which were printed on paper, had a very short lifespan. Lines would slowly… Read More
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont
7 January 2018
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont7 January 2018
– Editors
This large and exquisite drawing by Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont represents a garden design in the form of the plan of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza by Bernini. Serried ranks of trees rather than stone walls and columns are used to marshal a vast landscape into a perfect emblem of… Read More
The Politics of the Image
5 January 2018
The Politics of the Image5 January 2018
– Maria S. Giudici, Joseph Mercer, Florian Scheucher, Keranie Theodosiou, Livia Wang, Sophie Williams and Feifei Zhou
My course, The Politics of the Image at the Royal College of Art, drew on the Drawing Matter Collection amongst others to explore the construction of images since the Renaissance. This construction has allowed a crafty lie to evolve, be challenged and ultimately influence reality – albeit not always in straightforward ways.… Read More
Parataxis
28 December 2017
Parataxis28 December 2017
‘Whatever elements that may come to hand or that are selected from the profusion of materials within reach, are combined with words to create a simple poetic image. This should amuse, disturb, mystify or provoke reflection. These images above all should entertain – the only sure road to appreciation.’ Man… Read More
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House
23 December 2017
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House23 December 2017
Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More
Behind the Lines 2
19 December 2017
Behind the Lines 219 December 2017
An idle (and very fanciful) speculation on the origin of a drawing Gloria Gigliotti, hosiery buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue, looked at the drawing that Paddy O’Neil from the Art Department had bought in to her office that morning. She had asked him, for a quick $5.00 on the side,… Read More
Anthony Salvin
18 December 2017
Anthony Salvin18 December 2017
As Torquay expanded in the mid-nineteenth century with the town’s prominence as a seaside retreat and a connection to the South Devon railway made in 1848, new churches were built to accommodate the increased number of parishioners and seasonal visitors. Whilst construction of the new church of St Mary Magdalene… Read More
Gilles-Marie Oppenord
15 December 2017
Gilles-Marie Oppenord15 December 2017
For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More
William Butterfield
6 December 2017
William Butterfield6 December 2017
Nothing Permitted But What Has Been Foreseen William Butterfield eschewed the illustrative perspective, preferring instead to develop even his studies as contract drawings that would serve three tasks: as presentations through which a project could be comprehended, as instructions from which his contractors and clients could not swerve, and as… Read More
The Sacred Games of Art
1 December 2017
The Sacred Games of Art1 December 2017
These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More
Archives, or Ardor
26 October 2017
Archives, or Ardor26 October 2017
Butter, fire, ardor: Roberto Calasso tells us that Vedic India is one of the earliest civilisations and one about which the least is known, having left nothing behind but a few fragments of enigmatic texts about worship and sacrifice. No buildings, no palaces, no traces of temples. Just the simple instructions… Read More
Cedric Price: FIR Project
12 October 2017
Cedric Price: FIR Project12 October 2017
Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot
5 October 2017
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot5 October 2017
This drawing depicts a site-specific public art project, commissioned by the retail developer David Burmant, which entombed twenty junked cars under a layer of asphalt in a suburban shopping plaza. James Wines was interested in upending expectations about common iconographic elements of suburbia by inverting the relationship between such objects… Read More
Aldo Rossi
30 September 2017
Aldo Rossi30 September 2017
In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More
Hugh Strange: the Archive
22 September 2017
Hugh Strange: the Archive22 September 2017
Hugh Strange has been involved in the transformations of Shatwell farmyard since 2010. He first entered the conversation as client advisor for an Architecture Research Unit project for a new Gardener’s House on the Hadspen Estate. Although the house was never built, the presence of ARU acted as a catalyst to several living… Read More
Behind the Lines 1
22 September 2017
Behind the Lines 122 September 2017
I look at this drawing and imagine the following scenario: Rex Savidge, architect, is running short of time. He must submit his plan for a commercial development in Newcastle the following day. Giving it a last look over, he is generally pleased with it: he has taken particular care with the… Read More
Drawing from a Deep Well
22 September 2017
Drawing from a Deep Well22 September 2017
I make several different types of drawings in my life as an architect and as a teacher: those made at the speed of thought in B4 sketchbooks, on my lap or at the dining table or on trains or buses; tracing drawings made on bits torn from rolls of detail… Read More
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu
7 September 2017
Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu7 September 2017
One cannot see these drawings without seeing the mural by Sol LeWitt, in which an electrician has subsequently installed doorbells and a light switch. The mural is in the entrance hall of a city palace that was for a time the entrance to a gallery. When the gallery stopped its… Read More
A Blueprint is… Blue
24 January 2018
A Blueprint is… Blue24 January 2018
– Neil Bingham
A common error in looking at architectural drawings is to mistake mechanical reproductions for originals. Original and copy drawings both physically consist of two elements: the material (like ink) and the support (usually paper). But – and it may seem obvious to say – lines on paper are made by… Read More
housing interior plan DMC section elevation projection (axonometric isometric) presentation publication