Medium: photograph
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’
27.11.2019
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’27.11.2019
I. In a melancholy mood, the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia sat down at his drawing table in the little bed-sit he was renting in Geneva and took up his pencil and a little hardbound notebook to write down his ‘notes personelles / 1905’: ‘At my age, that of forty-three, I… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19.09.2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19.09.2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption
02.07.2019
Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption02.07.2019
My first experience with video art happened by chance. After obtaining an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I joined Lawrence Halprin & Associates, an architectural firm in San Francisco that specialised in the planning of urban spaces and then conveying, through varying means of visual communication, such ideas… Read More
Boompjes I
22.02.2019
Boompjes I22.02.2019
In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More
Zaha Hadid
27.11.2018
Zaha Hadid27.11.2018
When, in January 1983, Peter Cook reviewed a recently held exhibition for Zaha Hadid’s 59 Eaton Place, he spoke of the resonance between the individual and their education in developing an architectural identity. [1] He pondered on the development of Hadid over that period, What if fate had led her… Read More
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935
20.11.2018
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 193520.11.2018
Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett
11.11.2018
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett11.11.2018
– Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo
The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More
Behind the Lines 7
31.10.2018
Behind the Lines 731.10.2018
Mr. Tassie’s House On June 27th 1807 William Tassie scratched his long nose, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and finished off his letter to Alexander Wilson Esq of Messrs. Dunlop & Wilson, Booksellers of Glasgow: ‘I have been near a twelve month engaged with alterations in my house –… Read More
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell
09.10.2018
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell09.10.2018
To provoke an archaeology of collage making Niall Hobhouse asked Adolfo Natalini and Gian Piero Frassinelli to prepare a last collage, some 50 years after the first Continuous Monument, to imagine that it had finally arrived at Shatwell.
Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive
02.10.2018
Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive02.10.2018
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
Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics
07.09.2018
Conjunction and Incongruity
01.09.2018
Conjunction and Incongruity01.09.2018
The word archive, meaning both the collection of documents and the building that houses them, is doubled in its meaning and it is not necessarily clear which one precedes the other. Drawing Matter Open Day highlighted in interesting ways the relation of causality between building and drawing as document or… Read More
Richard J. Neutra
10.08.2018
Richard J. Neutra10.08.2018
‘Richard J. Neutra has carried on the Wagner tradition of experimentation in new forms, materials and methods of construction… an impetus to the intelligent solution of new problems.’ Ernestine M. Fantl on the Corona Avenue School, ‘Modern Architecture in California’ (Typescript Mimeograph, MoMA Archives, 1935) Just before 6 o’clock on… Read More
Yacht Club Path
02.08.2018
Yacht Club Path02.08.2018
I The drawings have different stories. They don’t have a linear story, a beginning date and then a finished date at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in the beginning before the project is built and then continue during the construction of the project and sometimes too – actually, quite often… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16.07.2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16.07.2018
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
Assemble: Collective Authorship
18.11.2017
Assemble: Collective Authorship18.11.2017
– Giles Smith and Adam Willis
Assemble’s practice was established in 2010 through a collective desire to build together, and our first projects were largely designed on site as we went. Our practice has been and remains organised cooperatively, without hierarchy, and our design methodologies have been developed to accommodate that particular dynamic. We use large-scale… Read More
The Drawing as Actor
05.09.2017
The Drawing as Actor05.09.2017
In two publications about post-war reconstruction, How should we rebuild London? (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1945) and Die Stalinallee Nationales Aufbauprogramme (Verlag Der Nation Berlin, 1952), the planning ferment in London and Berlin becomes a performance in itself, revealed through the choice of the media and subjects which they each adopt for illustration.… Read More
USSR in Construction No. 9 1931
01.09.2017
USSR in Construction No. 9 193101.09.2017
Constructing a Fantasy of the New Moscow through Architectural Photographs In June 1931 Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a speech to the Moscow plenum entitled, Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiyu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (On the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and other Socialist Cities of the USSR). The… Read More
Permanence
18.04.2017
Permanence18.04.2017
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
Perry Kulper
14.02.2017
Perry Kulper14.02.2017
‘Spatial Blooms’ and Digital Expectations Within the currently dominant visual culture, architectural drawing is persistently called to compete with a wide range of digital modes of visualisation, as well as fabrication, that tend towards simulation rather than representation. Is architectural drawing rendered redundant in this proliferation of digital renderings? And,… Read More
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre
18.01.2017
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre18.01.2017
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
Some Thoughts on Sheds
07.10.2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds07.10.2016
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
Surface-oriented
18.12.2019
Surface-oriented18.12.2019
– Rosa Nussbaum
My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. —Italo Calvino The here in question is a narrow room occupying the top floor of a three-storey house on the southern fringe of Montparnasse. Heavily laden bookshelves and strategically placed objets extend along the… Read More
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