Medium: drawing
Concrete Beach
13.08.2017
Concrete Beach13.08.2017
This drawing was made with a chinagraph pen over the course of a holiday afternoon. It started out roughly, as a quick sketch, but time stretched out as more people filled the page. I like using chinagraph as it can be sensitive to great softness and also very dark lines. I like its texture – it is a very… Read More
Dissecting
25.07.2017
Dissecting25.07.2017
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22.07.2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22.07.2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
Charles Percier
17.07.2017
Charles Percier17.07.2017
A Clean Mess Cleanliness is a trait shared by many architects and Charles Percier was no exception. The charming anecdote is told of Percier, the son of a laundrywoman, going to great lengths to keep his sheets of drawing paper safe from the ubiquitous ash of his pipe. The architect… Read More
A Souvenir and Survey
22.06.2017
A Souvenir and Survey22.06.2017
While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… Read More
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
07.06.2017
Karl Friedrich Schinkel07.06.2017
In his designs for the Tilebein House, Schinkel makes considerable use of different colours corresponding to the nature of the materials depicted. To indicate iron he uses a darkish blue, for wood mostly yellow and, of course, when he wants to show cut masonry (he is building in brick), he… Read More
Celia Scott: L’Attente
31.05.2017
Celia Scott: L’Attente31.05.2017
Space Stares Back ‘Space’ has come to mean much more than the OED definition, although even there, for such a small word, it has a surprising length, depth and breadth of meaning. It is space that Celia Scott is defining in her ultimately abstract work. As a trained architect with… Read More
A Space / Two Spaces
30.05.2017
A Space / Two Spaces30.05.2017
The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate: Reading Writing Sleeping … Read More
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena
19.05.2017
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena19.05.2017
When, in the two-point perspective drawings of Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the viewer’s line of sight ricocheted off the centre and shot in opposite directions off stage, a new prospect of social and architectural order was proposed. For the century preceding the work of the brothers – Antonio, Giuseppe, and Ferdinando… Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
04.05.2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer04.05.2017
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
Permanence
18.04.2017
Permanence18.04.2017
Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More
Mario Sironi
27.03.2017
Mario Sironi27.03.2017
Politics as a Pretext for Making Mario Sironi compromised and traumatised in equal parts by his association with Italian Fascism, was known primarily as a painter and propagandist. He worked with and can be compared to Giuseppe Terragni, Mussolini’s most faithful architect, in his devotion to art as an ideological… Read More
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s
21.03.2017
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s21.03.2017
Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known for their innovative graphic design and spectacular photomontages which… Read More
Eisenman: House II
17.03.2017
Eisenman: House II17.03.2017
Drawing is a way of thinking. I can’t think or write ideas on a computer. I write and if you look at my desk, it’s full of paper. So to me drawing is a form of writing, and a form of reading what I write. I don’t see any difference.… Read More
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother
17.03.2017
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother17.03.2017
In this drawing of his project for a house for a sculptor, Ugo La Pietra tries to criticise the boxiness of the standard house and the context of the city. Working to synthesise the forms and disciplines of art and architecture, he draws an enveloping free-form volume on pillars. This… Read More
Narrative Architecture
10.03.2017
Narrative Architecture10.03.2017
Executed after it opened, this drawing captures the intended vibrancy of one of my first built projects, a café tacked onto the front of a department store in downtown Shibuya. The architectural bricolage of the built space translated well into the mixed media technique of splurged acrylic paint, caked-on oil… Read More
Galli da Bibiena
10.03.2017
Galli da Bibiena10.03.2017
In 1732, renowned architect and painter Ferdinando Galli da Bibiena published a meticulously compiled document illustrating a theory of perspective for the specific use of the architect and the painter. The book was intended for the students of Bologna’s Accademia Clementina (currently the city’s Academy of Fine Arts) and had… Read More
Jørn Utzon
03.03.2017
Jørn Utzon03.03.2017
I had been working from late 1956 to 1957 with Vilhelm Wohlert on the schemes of Louisiana and the summerhouse for Niels Bohr, and suddenly there was no more work. Wohlert, who knew all my weaknesses (he had been my teacher in my fifth year at school) advised me to… Read More
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook
02.03.2017
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook02.03.2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
01.03.2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project01.03.2017
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22.02.2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22.02.2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
Salvador Dalí
28.07.2017
Salvador Dalí28.07.2017
There is evidence that Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic study for a building facade is part of a real project, but we don’t know what that might be. The sketch resists interpretation and association, far different from anything else Dalí produced at the time: 1939 – a year in which he has… Read More
civic & municipal DMC sketch elevation art practice theoretical & imaginary