Period: c20th
Drawing on the Nolli Plan
1 May 2020
Drawing on the Nolli Plan1 May 2020
Every January, when John and I visit Rome, I bring a set of A3 photocopies of the Nolli plan (Giambattista Nolli’s Nuova Topografia di Roma, 1748). I don’t bring the whole map – it stretches to twelve sheets, each about A2 in size – so before arriving I am already editing… Read More
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper
30 April 2020
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper30 April 2020
This scrap of paper, perhaps scooped up from the floor or a waste basket in Louis Kahn’s studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, shows a single sketch – spidery lines outlining a modest block and strange openings. Beginning drawing in 1958 Kahn searched for a design of a new building… Read More
Grounded: Plans & Planning
29 April 2020
Grounded: Plans & Planning29 April 2020
– Richard Hall and Niall Hobhouse
The following is part of an email exchange between Niall Hobhouse and Richard Hall in response to Richard’s text on James Gowan and John Hejduk, One Thing Leads to Another. Niall Hobhouse: When you have time, I thought it would be interesting to encourage you to think about why it is… Read More
Shape
28 April 2020
Shape28 April 2020
Shape calls attention to things and their meanings. Architects, whether they mean to or not, give shape to things, and the people who see or inhabit those things, whether in full consciousness or not, respond to these shapes. The dimensions of this response are somewhat difficult to measure, since they… Read More
Haiku
28 April 2020
Haiku28 April 2020
Here John Cage is writing in November 1950 to Cecil Smith, the Editor of Musical America, in passionate defence of Eric Satie, who had been attacked in the journal in an article by Abraham Skulsky. In 1948, Cage had delivered a controversial talk at Black Mountain College, titled ‘Defense of Satie,’… Read More
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension
28 April 2020
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension28 April 2020
The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More
Space
27 April 2020
Space27 April 2020
Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More
Daria’s Aria
23 April 2020
Daria’s Aria23 April 2020
Between 1939 and 1941 the French-born, Milan-based editor Daria Guarnati published seven volumes of a series called Aria d’Italia. Each issue formed a substantial monograph on a distinct facet of Italian life and culture. The inaugural Christmas edition was followed by the evocatively titled issues ‘Italy through Colour’, ‘Mediterranean Summer’, ‘The… Read More
One Thing Leads to Another
23 April 2020
One Thing Leads to Another23 April 2020
Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23 April 2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23 April 2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
Language & the Doorn Manifesto
14 April 2020
Language & the Doorn Manifesto14 April 2020
The following audio clips are extracts from an interview with Peter Smithson conducted in 1997 for the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. To listen to the full interview, click here. On language Peter Smithson on the change from the use of French to English as the predominant language of… Read More
The Garden of Earthly Delights
9 April 2020
The Garden of Earthly Delights9 April 2020
The essay is an excerpt from Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, by Hamed Khosravi, published by Hatje Cantz. Pre-order through the publisher’s website or visiting www.guevrekian.org.
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)
8 April 2020
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)8 April 2020
Sixteen swim in synchrony. Bright red trunks, blue swim caps, in a perfectly choreographed 4 x 4 grid of bodies in motion. They swim in the shallow pale blue pool that contains them, as it floats in the ocean. They are about to collide with a dock that is too… Read More
Where Words Fail
6 April 2020
Where Words Fail6 April 2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Web of Intrigue
3 April 2020
Web of Intrigue3 April 2020
Searching the internet for the drawings of Michael Sorkin, one comes across a lengthy list of the projects that have emerged from his eponymously titled studio. Halfway down the list can be found an exotic beauty of a drawing soberly captioned thus: House of the Future. 1999. Coloured Pencil, Hand… Read More
Drawing Culture at SOM New York
3 April 2020
Drawing Culture at SOM New York3 April 2020
When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More
Gowan on the English House
1 April 2020
Gowan on the English House1 April 2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Retail Therapy
30 March 2020
Retail Therapy30 March 2020
In architectural design the size of the human unit must always be borne in mind. It is nowhere more necessary to observe this maxim than in the determination of the scale of shop fronts, for here not only is the tendency to an undue magnification of parts most strongly encouraged… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30 March 2020
Houses of Work and Play30 March 2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art
27 March 2020
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art27 March 2020
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25 March 2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25 March 2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built
20 March 2020
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built20 March 2020
There are several curiosities in the plan of this classic modernist house by Richard Neutra. First, more area is allowed for dogs than for music. Second, there is a two-car garage, but a separate parking-space for a Rolls-Royce. Here is fine discrimination. But fine discrimination is exactly what you would… Read More
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)
4 May 2020
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)4 May 2020
– Esther McCoy
Extracted, with permission, from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, published by East of Borneo Books © 2012. The publication is available at East of Borneo.
elevation presentation domestic DMC plan section