Medium: drawing
The Lost Art of Drawing
4 November 2015
The Lost Art of Drawing4 November 2015
The following has been excerpted from Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing, New York Times, 2012. I personally like to draw on translucent … tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before, and again, creating a personal, emotional connection… Read More
Dismantled Sketchbook
2 November 2015
Dismantled Sketchbook2 November 2015
To some extent this is the battleground of the British architectural avant-garde; the incompatibilities of graphics and architecture, the freedom that the former allows and the restrictions that the latter asserts. In recent years, the graphics have got smoother whilst the dialectic has remained largely unresolved. A conclusive project is… Read More
The Open Hand (1954)
1 November 2015
The Open Hand (1954)1 November 2015
The Open Hand will affirm that the second era of the machine-civilisation, the era of harmony, has started. -Le Corbusier
Zünd-Up: ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system
23 October 2015
Zünd-Up: ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system23 October 2015
An element in this Viennese collective’s proposal to extend the city into a newly ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system, this ‘Cortina-Bob-Bahn’ would have ornamented the gardens of the Prater with a drive-yourself roller-coaster tower some 1500 metres high.
A Brutal Matter (1962)
16 October 2015
A Brutal Matter (1962)16 October 2015
Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives
13 October 2015
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives13 October 2015
‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More
Haus-Rücker-Co.
9 October 2015
Haus-Rücker-Co.9 October 2015
This art collective – we might call them the ‘house thief company’ or ‘house drawing company’– took its name from a pun on the verb ‘to draw’ and an old slang word for ‘thief’. Their projects during this period involved interventions in which a house or building would be ‘stolen’… Read More
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents
2 October 2015
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents2 October 2015
1-170-604: Zelthaut für ein kugelkalottenförmiges Zeltgestell 1-097-653: Bauwerk in Kugel- oder Kugelabschnittform 1-292-354: Räumliches Gitterwerk für Gewölbe, Kuppeln 926-229: Geodesic Dome 1-294-387: Dôme à construction triangulée 1-009-850: Geodesic Structures
Buckminster Fuller
1 October 2015
Buckminster Fuller1 October 2015
Slenderness, Lightness, and Strength. From Inventions: The Patented Works of R.Buckminster Fuller, 1983
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle
1 October 2015
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle1 October 2015
The watercolour of the Sainte-Chapelle drawn by Lassus dates from the first years of the restoration, when the desire to restore the monument to its original thirteenth-century form was still very strong. The chapel is shown without its fifteenth-century flamboyant rose window and its exterior staircase built by Louis XII,… Read More
A life of their own (1985)
28 August 2015
A life of their own (1985)28 August 2015
The following has been excerpted from Staying Creative; Artistic Passion is a Lifelong Pursuit – and These Mature Masters Prove the Point. (Otto Luening, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Rudolph), December 1985. I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It… Read More
John Lautner: house and studio for Edgar Ewing
28 August 2015
John Lautner: house and studio for Edgar Ewing28 August 2015
On presenting himself as a potential apprentice at Taliesin to Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., Lautner heard no objection except the sly comment that he would be ‘too big for the rooms’. Everything about his approach to visualising a design speaks to the distance from which this towering figure saw the… Read More
History & Origins
21 August 2015
History & Origins21 August 2015
And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund: the father
14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund: the father14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Sketch from Vézelay from letter to Mérimée (1843)
31 July 2015
Sketch from Vézelay from letter to Mérimée (1843)31 July 2015
From a letter to Mérimée written in 1843 from Vézelay: You, Sir, who have ceaselessly lived the life of the past, you understand the joy, the secret happiness felt when we can record in our sketchbook some of these forgotten [historical] treasures … but how much more interesting when these… Read More
Five Boxes
10 June 2015
Five Boxes10 June 2015
Line drawing — drawing without shading, cross-hatching or chiaroscuro — permits and conveys the most precise sense of accuracy of any kind of drawing. The facts are laid bare, nothing can be fudged or obscured. Leonardo used line drawing for his studies of everything from flying machines to the human… Read More
Wagnerschule
1 June 2015
Wagnerschule1 June 2015
The drawings of Emil Hoppe (1876 – 1957) and Otto Schönthal (1878–1961) attracted particular interest in the Land Marks exhibition, and people were eager for us to share them more widely. They are presented here with little comment and a few additions for context. These drawings by Emil Hoppe, Otto Schönthal and… Read More
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins
9 February 2015
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins9 February 2015
– Editors
This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More
Potomania (1982)
8 January 2015
Potomania (1982)8 January 2015
Call it ‘Potomania’ — plants and flowers above all … a column of water cascading freely on to a little pond … the column a staff both shining and singing.
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s
29 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s29 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
The changing metropolis 1815–1900
27 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1815–190027 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More
The changing metropolis 1900–1930s
26 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1900–1930s26 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part II: Unifying the city landscape: 1900–1930s The area of Finsbury in north London became a borough in 1900 and proposals rapidly appeared to replace the terraces of George Dance the Younger’s Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus with a large volume of continuous office blocks. John Belcher’s proposal seems to… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part III
3 June 2013
Future Scenarios, Part III3 June 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More
James Gowan: The Expandable House
1 November 2015
James Gowan: The Expandable House1 November 2015
– Markus Lähteenmäki
James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More
sketch plan section projection (axonometric isometric) theoretical & imaginary domestic DMC