Period: c18th
Galli da Bibiena
10 March 2017
Galli da Bibiena10 March 2017
In 1732, renowned architect and painter Ferdinando Galli da Bibiena published a meticulously compiled document illustrating a theory of perspective for the specific use of the architect and the painter. The book was intended for the students of Bologna’s Accademia Clementina (currently the city’s Academy of Fine Arts) and had… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22 February 2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22 February 2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
James Malton
30 January 2017
James Malton30 January 2017
Trees and Clouds: the picturesque, perspective and aquatint An early architectural use of aquatint was James Malton’s 1798 book An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle, That Peculiar Mode of Building Which Was Originally the Work of Chance. Malton took his authority from Uvedale Price’s An Essay… Read More
Pier Leone Ghezzi
20 January 2017
Pier Leone Ghezzi20 January 2017
This drawing by the Roman artist Ghezzi depicts an unusual funerary monument, commissioned by the Sacchetti family for their beloved donkey called ‘Grillo’ (Cricket). According to the extensive inscription, this clever and loyal animal regularly carried baskets all alone from central Rome to the Sacchetti’s Villa Pigneto, ten kilometres away.… Read More
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds
24 October 2016
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds24 October 2016
Paper by Anthony Auerbach read at the Architectural Drawings Symposium, Shatwell, 24 April 2016. I would like to introduce two items from this collection, or rather two collections our host has brought together, whose cohabitation here prompted me to consider whether they are related and whether the relation can be… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’
1 August 2016
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’1 August 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
Charles de Wailly
10 June 2016
Charles de Wailly10 June 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
4 June 2016
François-Joseph Bélanger4 June 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
Ducros: Arch of Titus
1 May 2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus1 May 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
Robert Mylne
1 April 2016
Robert Mylne1 April 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
Etudes des fragments d’architecture
6 March 2016
Etudes des fragments d’architecture6 March 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
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins
9 February 2015
François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins9 February 2015
– Editors
This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More
Displaced persons
3 October 2012
Displaced persons3 October 2012
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Architects are extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate into their visual descriptions of buildings any evidence that the real subject their structures serve, and around whose activities they are so carefully formulated, is people. Here’s a look at a few of the moments when this unspoken rule has been broken. Distances: Using… Read More
Architectural anxiety
28 September 2011
Architectural anxiety28 September 2011
– 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
6 May 2011
Simplification6 May 2011
– 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
Landscape situations
21 January 2011
Landscape situations21 January 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
4 May 2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer4 May 2017
– Basile Baudez
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
sketch elevation publication concept & diagram theoretical & imaginary domestic DMC