Medium: print
Watkin on Milizia: Frontispiece to The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern
17.01.2020
Watkin on Milizia: Frontispiece to The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern17.01.2020
The illustration on the title page to the Vite is striking and can be seen as a preparation for that of Pugin’s Contrasts (Sailsbury 1836). Milizia depicts a crowded scene in which, on the left hand side, a Corinthian portico and Laugier’s primitive hut, fashioned from trees and branches, represent Antiquity and Nature. Pallas,… Read More
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture
26.12.2019
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture26.12.2019
One of the best-known drawings related to the discipline is the ‘allegory of architecture’, drawn by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen and engraved by Jean-Jacques Aliamet. [1] The original is now in the collection of Drawing Matter. Aliamet’s engraving serves as the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, and was included… Read More
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments
09.12.2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments09.12.2019
The following text was first published in 1977 in an issue of AD Profiles dedicated to the Millbank Housing Competition. Run by the Crown Estate, the competition to develop a site adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge attracted nearly five hundred entries, including proposals from Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,… Read More
Liquid Paper
15.11.2019
Liquid Paper15.11.2019
In The Praise of Hemp-Seed, John Taylor – the self-styled Jacobean ‘water poet’ – at one point asks why poets have never sung the virtues of the plant before. It is, he answers himself, because their words run dry in the face of the limitless goods it brings – ‘the… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
07.11.2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson07.11.2019
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23.09.2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23.09.2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… 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
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan
19.08.2019
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan19.08.2019
This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More
Learning from the Tortoise
09.08.2019
Learning from the Tortoise09.08.2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
Ugliness and Judgment
19.04.2019
Ugliness and Judgment19.04.2019
In the summer of 1740, John Wood the Elder ventured his first study of the lithic monuments that surrounded his native city of Bath, drawing sketches of the stones at Stanton Drew. These earned him the patronage of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, which enabled Wood to undertake more… Read More
Boompjes II
28.02.2019
Boompjes II28.02.2019
Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… 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
Behind the Lines 9
02.02.2019
Behind the Lines 902.02.2019
Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through the… Read More
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3
21.01.2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 321.01.2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2
21.01.2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 221.01.2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… 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
Commonplace
12.11.2018
Commonplace12.11.2018
In 1877, London’s Building News reprinted – as the ‘work of two eminent architects, though it cannot be said to be their joint production’ – an elevation, plan, and partial section published by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as a model town house, noting that this supposed ‘London Residence’ had been adapted – with due… Read More
Madelon Vriesendorp
04.11.2018
Madelon Vriesendorp04.11.2018
– Niall Hobhouse and Madelon Vriesdendorp
Excerpted from Madelon Vreisendop in conversation with Niall Hobhouse, RIBA, 2 July 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980
23.10.2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023.10.2018
– Editors
On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea — what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… 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
Remembered Space
22.04.2018
Remembered Space22.04.2018
A subtle and beguiling assemblage of recent works by Celia Scott is appropriately mounted on the plywood walls of the intimate Velorose Gallery, Charterhouse Square, London (13th April to 18th May 2018). Plywood, aluminium and carefully modulated surfaces that are revealed or obscured by spray paint are the stuff of… Read More
AL_A: V&A Exhibition Road Quarter
05.03.2018
AL_A: V&A Exhibition Road Quarter05.03.2018
Farshid Moussavi’s brief for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition asked for representations of the complexities of designing and realising buildings and structures. We illustrated this by overlaying each level of intervention in a different colour – from the existing V&A stonework in green, the services in purple, to the… Read More
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence
14.02.2018
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence14.02.2018
– Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan
There is an uncanny gap between the cold precision of a computer drawing and the confusing uncertainty of the design process. We try to bridge that gap with a collaborative method that includes a lot of discussions and the use of computer-prints, scalpel, glue, pencil and Tipp-Ex. The drawing above… Read More
Origins in Translation
20.01.2020
Origins in Translation20.01.2020
– Mari Lending
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
Extracts: Women Writing Architecture DMC student work publication theoretical & imaginary agriculture graphic design