Medium: drawing

On Drawing

On Drawing

Adolfo Natalini

When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More

Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole

Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole

Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving… Read More

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)

Carlos Diniz

The following is excerpted from Two Continuous Monuments, by Nicholas Olsberg. Published in the AA Files No. 71, 2015. The architect’s guiding idea has been to create a building which would ‘literally tend to disappear – becoming one with the landscape’ … The dramatic architectural concept and primarily coniferous flora… Read More

Henri Labrouste

Henri Labrouste

Barry Bergdoll

The following has been excerpted from Labrouste (1801-1875), Architecte : La structure mise en lumière, 2012. In 1840 Labrouste plays an essential role in a political spectacle in which the stakes are high for the faltering regime of Louis Philippe: the return of Napoleon’s ashes that will be buried in the… Read More

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb

The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More

View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)

View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)

Michael Webb

All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.

A Lung for the City (1984)

A Lung for the City (1984)

Cedric Price

The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More

Believe in books (1998)

Believe in books (1998)

John Hejduk

I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. -John Hejduk Quoted from Such Places as Memory, 1998

Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City

Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City

Andrea Branzi

Archizoom describe this ‘hypothetical theatre’ as part of a fluid and unstoppable culture, a non-stop metropolis re-imagined to fit the times, characterised by mobile theatres, unbound books, rooms without plan, unwritten music, … and cities made of voids. For the first time the presentation technique has … become a specific… Read More

The Lost Art of Drawing

The Lost Art of Drawing

Michael Graves

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

Dismantled Sketchbook

James Gowan

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)

The Open Hand (1954)

Le Corbusier

The Open Hand will affirm that the second era of the machine-civilisation, the era of harmony, has started. -Le Corbusier

James Gowan: The Expandable House

James Gowan: The Expandable House

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

Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System

Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System

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)

A Brutal Matter (1962)

Walter Pichler

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

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

‘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.

Haus-Rücker-Co.

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

Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents

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

Buckminster Fuller

Slenderness, Lightness, and Strength. From Inventions: The Patented Works of R.Buckminster Fuller, 1983

Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle

Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle

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)

A Life of Their Own (1985)

Paul Rudolph

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

John Lautner: House and Studio for Edgar Ewing

Nicholas Olsberg

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

History & Origins

Aldo Rossi

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