Medium: drawing
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park
22.08.2016
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park22.08.2016
In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More
Notes on the 2016 Summer School
21.08.2016
Notes on the 2016 Summer School21.08.2016
Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Michael Graves
07.08.2016
Michael Graves07.08.2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’
01.08.2016
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’01.08.2016
The great poet carefully instructs Francis Bird on the memorial tablet for his father – also Alexander Pope – to be placed in the north gallery of St Mary’s, Twickenham. Pope asks the sculptor to record his own respect for his father, to leave a space for his mother’s name… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
01.08.2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation01.08.2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
From the Desk of John Summerson
01.08.2016
From the Desk of John Summerson01.08.2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means,… Read More
Jean-Baptiste Lassus
01.08.2016
Jean-Baptiste Lassus01.08.2016
After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More
Fontaine: Market Stalls
01.08.2016
Fontaine: Market Stalls01.08.2016
The following text is an excerpt from a conference paper given by Basile Baudez as part of the Rencontres du Centre André Chastel, Paris, May 2016. The ‘History of Colour in Architectural Drawing, 16th–19th Centuries’ is part of a forthcoming book. Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing… Read More
Charles de Wailly
10.06.2016
Charles de Wailly10.06.2016
The high level of ornamental detail and the conspicuously novel elements of stove and fountain suggest that this drawing may have been among those exhibition-drawings that de Wailly sent to the Paris Salon from 1771 onwards, the year he was controversially admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.… Read More
François-Joseph Bélanger
04.06.2016
François-Joseph Bélanger04.06.2016
This drawing is one of more than twenty alternative designs for a room in the Paris mansion built for Anne-Victoire Dervieux opera dancer and, from 1794, the architect and designer Bélanger’s wife. Bélanger imagines for Dervieux a scheme of ‘Etruscan’ arabesques loosely inspired by the archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and… Read More
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad
12.05.2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12.05.2016
Published in 1970, fourteen years after the first Playboy Pad of 1956, and with ‘a new decade dawning’, this penthouse design by Robert Bray was presented as ‘the pinnacle of urban living’, combining ‘the latest technological and architectural advances with an idea as old as the hills’: Roman houses that were built… Read More
The Imperial Palace of God
09.05.2016
The Imperial Palace of God09.05.2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
Ducros: Arch of Titus
01.05.2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus01.05.2016
This drawing by the Swiss artist Abraham-Louis-Alphonse Ducros — a preliminary sketch with a deep perspectival view of the Arch of Titus in Rome, and inspired by Panini’s Arch of Titus, 1745 — is the basis for one of his standard images, a definitive view of Rome sold to eighteenth-century… Read More
The Birth of the Column
07.04.2016
The Birth of the Column07.04.2016
The following text is excepted from an interview with Kate Goodwin, in: Sensing Spaces, Architecture Reimagined, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. All drawings are by Álvaro Siza, 2013–2014, for the design, placement and installation of three columns in precast yellow concrete, first in the courtyard of Burlington House and then in… Read More
Robert Mylne
01.04.2016
Robert Mylne01.04.2016
There are two sons of Deacon Mylne’s in Rome at present, studying architecture. One of them had studied in France and has accordingly that abominable taste to perfection: the other, who came straight from Scotland, has made great progress and begins to draw extremely well, so that if he goes… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18.03.2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18.03.2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)
11.03.2016
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)11.03.2016
The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More
Etudes des fragments d’architecture
06.03.2016
Etudes des fragments d’architecture06.03.2016
Signed and dated ‘à Rome 1777’, this drawing was one of a series of studies executed after the antique by Jean-Augustin Renard when a student in Rome, and later published in Paris in Etudes des fragments d’architecture (1783). The acanthus leaf is ubiquitous in Western ornament. Supremely versatile, it can be deployed… Read More
Barthélemy Enfantin
12.09.2016
Barthélemy Enfantin12.09.2016
– Helen Thomas
This strange, flat drawing in watercolour, ink and pencil comprises a sheet of studies thought to be made by French economist and political theorist Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin in 1849. It depicts ideas for the organisation of a military complex, a cité militaire, possibly with Algeria in mind as a location. Enfantin published… Read More
elevation presentation civic & municipal DMC