Period: c19th
Keshi Ghat
13 May 2021
Keshi Ghat13 May 2021
Seeing is a reaching out, a kind of metaphorical touching that involves one’s whole being and is reciprocal. Amita Singh If you hadn’t read the title of the drawing, you would have probably guessed that this would have been a riverfront mosque in India. I did too. The courtyards reminding… Read More
14 Wine Street, Bristol
29 April 2021
14 Wine Street, Bristol29 April 2021
Whilst leafing through the Drawing Matter collection, this drawing from 1885, by architect Henry Crisp, caught my eye. The drawing depicts a new shopfront and facade to be grafted on to the existing structure of 14 Wine Street, Bristol. Initially, the design struck me as remarkably contemporary and I came… Read More
The Beaux-Arts Tradition
29 April 2021
The Beaux-Arts Tradition29 April 2021
– Basile Baudez and Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
The following text has been excerpted from Living with Architecture as Art, the recently published catalogue of Peter May’s collection of drawings, models and architectural artefacts. The catalogue is edited by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger and published in two generously illustrated volumes. The first volume includes essays by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Basile Baudez,… Read More
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics
12 April 2021
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics12 April 2021
It is the unique trait of the section drawing to fragment the singularity of built form, to allow the reading of a building as a series of individual pieces, and thereby delay our innate predilection for gestalt. Much like an erratic (in geology, an erratic is a material moved by geologic forces from… Read More
Balzac architecte (1856)
9 April 2021
Balzac architecte (1856)9 April 2021
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Adam Bede’s ‘Discourse on Building’ (1859)
6 April 2021
Adam Bede’s ‘Discourse on Building’ (1859)6 April 2021
This speech on building – and on architects – was made by Adam, to Mr Poyser, and comes in Chapter 49 of the novel. It was pointed out to us by the Eliot scholar, Dermot Coleman, who added that ‘it is generally a safe bet that views on such matters expressed… Read More
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy
9 February 2021
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy9 February 2021
John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More
The Architect and the Matador
8 February 2021
The Architect and the Matador8 February 2021
On one sheet, a matador;on the other, a design,with measurements for a cathedral pier. What unites these drawingsis provenance:both, apparently, executedby the architectEugène Viollet-le-Ducin meetings. As Viollet-le-Duc’s mind wanderedfrom doodle to design,my attention,beholding the drawings,is drawn between the two sheets; drawn, by the insistently connective impulseof looking,into associations. Between architect… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse
22 January 2021
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse22 January 2021
In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… Read More
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints
21 December 2020
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints21 December 2020
They began to bloom on websites a couple of years or so ago – stretching out on social media, unfurling in the arts sections. Pale alien shapes suspended in deep blue: something like lightning flattened in a flower press; a sleeping creature emerging from a cloud of coral; a spectral… Read More
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review
4 May 2021
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review4 May 2021
– Stan Allen
In a series of essays and lectures developed between 1939 and 1943, the philosopher of science Edgar Zilsel identified three distinct sources of knowledge in the Renaissance. In the late-medieval period, writes Zilsel, the traditional learning associated with the universities was still theological and scholastic in character. The texts preserved… Read More
section topographic/cartographic publication concept & diagram