Medium: model
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16 July 2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16 July 2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House
26 April 2018
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House26 April 2018
Somebody said the story about the orange is not right, but it is: he sent one of us over to the shop to buy an orange and he peeled it and took up the segments. Mogens Prip-Buus on Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19 January 2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19 January 2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing
14 January 2018
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing14 January 2018
The idea of using tape drawings originated for climatic reasons: India goes through a five-month monsoon season each year, and during this time it is very humid. For us this meant that the drawings we were producing, which were printed on paper, had a very short lifespan. Lines would slowly… Read More
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures
11 January 2018
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures11 January 2018
‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More
Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House
12 October 2017
Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House12 October 2017
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
This photograph was made of a physical model as part of the ongoing process of working on the design. It was made to test the scale and dimensions of the various elements that make up the space of one of two large rooms within the ‘Stage House’, a small shed… Read More
Hugh Strange: the Archive
22 September 2017
Hugh Strange: the Archive22 September 2017
Hugh Strange has been involved in the transformations of Shatwell farmyard since 2010. He first entered the conversation as client advisor for an Architecture Research Unit project for a new Gardener’s House on the Hadspen Estate. Although the house was never built, the presence of ARU acted as a catalyst to several living… Read More
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling
2 August 2017
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling2 August 2017
The very fact that The Builder should publish an article explaining the benefits, the uses and the methods of making architectural models indicates just how novel the concept was in 1895, even in theory. ‘Architecture Modelling’ was the result of the almost unprecedented display of an actual model at the Royal Academy… Read More
Dissecting
25 July 2017
Dissecting25 July 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
Permanence
18 April 2017
Permanence18 April 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
Jørn Utzon
3 March 2017
Jørn Utzon3 March 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
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling
9 February 2017
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling9 February 2017
– Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan
Hard lead pencils are unforgiving and require concentration, precision and humility when drawing with them. By using a hard lead the painterly effect associated with soft pencil sketches is avoided, with their tolerance to imprecision and visual sloppiness. Sketching with a hard lead requires focus. The joy of drawing a… Read More
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre
18 January 2017
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre18 January 2017
We have been making model photographs for the last twenty-five years, and these images have always skirted between abstraction and concrete reality. They show a world where the atmosphere of our buildings is explicitly evoked at the same time as creating an uncanny sense of the actual size and material… Read More
Alexander Brodsky
15 October 2016
Alexander Brodsky15 October 2016
There is someone behind Alexander Brodsky’s unfired clay facades. It might be a housekeeper behind one, a bored Kafkaesque rond-de-cuir behind another. It could be just an architect. They all draw and archive the objects and spaces they discover in these buildings, and reassemble them like an archeologist reassembles what he excavates:… Read More
Some Thoughts on Sheds
7 October 2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds7 October 2016
In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More
Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project
18 September 2016
Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project18 September 2016
– Alex Bank and Sam Casswell
The Garden Rooms academy drawing by Casswell Bank Architect’s is a depiction of the relationship between the new shed, the Maltings buildings and its gardens located at the western edge of Bruton. The drawing extends beyond the adjacent road connecting the town with the countryside and the river Brue that… Read More
Fontaine: Market Stalls
1 August 2016
Fontaine: Market Stalls1 August 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
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15 July 2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15 July 2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
13 March 2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813 March 2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More
Ville Spatiale
20 November 2015
Ville Spatiale20 November 2015
The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More
Three Projects (1969)
12 November 2015
Three Projects (1969)12 November 2015
I believe in the density of the sparse. The Diamond Thesis is both creative and analytical. It implies new points of view in architectural space. It delineates with clarity the frontal facet of isometric projection in the two-dimensional space of the picture plane of the drawings. The realisation that works… Read More
The hatred of rendering (1930)
1 August 2015
The hatred of rendering (1930)1 August 2015
The following has been extracted from a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1930. I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is… Read More
Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive
2 October 2018
Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive2 October 2018
We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More
sketch presentation exhibition record Buildings Projects at Shatwell Farm