Medium: drawing

Future Scenarios, Part I

Future Scenarios, Part I

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Capturing the rainbow: the city of tomorrow On any given day late in the 1930s, so someone has calculated, more than 30,000 Americans either bought a train ticket or ordered lunch looking at one of the murals of the designer Winold Reiss. With each new commission, and as the burdens… Read More

Displaced persons

Displaced persons

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Architects are extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate into their visual descriptions of buildings any evidence that the real subject their structures serve, and around whose activities they are so carefully formulated, is people. Here’s a look at a few of the moments when this unspoken rule has been broken. Distances: Using… Read More

Architectural anxiety

Architectural anxiety

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More

Simplification

Simplification

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More

Landscape situations

Landscape situations

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More