Medium: print

New Babylon (1963)

New Babylon (1963)

Constant

The following is excerpted from Constant’s New Bablyon, 1963, and translated by Kenny Stevens. Books full of words, oral, printed traditions fixed the cities as a law of life for generations – conquered and vanquished before and re-erected. Buried under a hollowed time, or still an endless and compelling space,… 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

Future Scenarios, Part III

Future Scenarios, Part III

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More

Architectural Anxiety

Architectural Anxiety

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More

Simplification

Simplification

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More