Period: c20th
Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing
21.03.2025
Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing21.03.2025
The building is in many ways as extraordinary as its details. At ground-floor level it confronts the visitor with a blank wall of hard-faced red brick, which is occasionally pierced with a rather private-looking doorway, except at the point where the glazed main-entrance lobby splits this defensive podium into two… Read More
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter
20.03.2025
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter20.03.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams
14.03.2025
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams14.03.2025
‘Only the realization of utopias will make man happy and release him from his frustrations! Use your imagination! Join in… Share the power! Share property.’ Wolf Vostell, Cologne 1969 [1] On June 28, 1969, the four members of the Viennese collective Zünd-Up presented their student project, The Great Vienna Auto-Expander, for Karl… Read More
Broadcasting Norwegian Time
13.03.2025
Broadcasting Norwegian Time13.03.2025
All drawings were done by Nils Holter Office during the NRK project period 1941-47, each made in pencil on paper with the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Drawings from Nils Holter’s archives/Jan Bauck Arkitektkontor. Photographs courtesy of Jørgen Johan Tandberg. In the summer of 2024, and after several… Read More
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation
06.03.2025
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation06.03.2025
The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’.… Read More
Making their Curves Come True…
28.02.2025
Making their Curves Come True…28.02.2025
– Editors
By the 1950s, a generation of architectural draughtsmen had abandoned their Beaux Arts ‘curves’ for the rulers and set squares of High Modernism; they had to be tempted back, by whatever means, to drawing the irregular curves that were both a possibility—and a feature—of the new architecture of structural concrete.… Read More
Haunted Venice
21.02.2025
Haunted Venice21.02.2025
After Niall Hobhouse saw an image of my collage, Venice Haunted, he sent me some comparable images, including a Hogarth frontispiece for a book on perspective theory and practice (1745). Its caption reads: ‘Whoever makes a design without the knowledge of perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are… Read More
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text
18.02.2025
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text18.02.2025
Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More
Drawing on Ideas
17.02.2025
Drawing on Ideas17.02.2025
In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More
Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis
14.02.2025
Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis14.02.2025
‘He pulls down, he builds up, he exchanges square for round.‘Horace—Epistles. I. 1. 100[1] The Aldo van Eyck drawing currently on show at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields appears, at first glance, to do precisely this. A preliminary drawing, one made for the design of the architect’s own house, on transparent… Read More
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27
13.02.2025
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-2713.02.2025
In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More
Eisenman on Rossi
12.02.2025
Eisenman on Rossi12.02.2025
Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping… Read More
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank
11.02.2025
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank11.02.2025
Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto
10.02.2025
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 10.02.2025
– Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman
This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More
Lisson 1 + 2
07.02.2025
Lisson 1 + 207.02.2025
LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More
Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees
04.02.2025
Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees04.02.2025
This text is loosely based on the first part of my lecture ‘The Landscape Model,’ delivered at the Sverre Fehn-designed Hedmark Museum in October 2023. The lecture was part of the Sverre Fehn Symposium ‘Authoring Architecture in Time’ organised by AHO and the Hedmark Museum, and curated by Professor Mari… Read More
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter
03.02.2025
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter03.02.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper
31.01.2025
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper31.01.2025
The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend… Read More
Anton Markus Pasing
30.01.2025
Anton Markus Pasing30.01.2025
Münster, March 2024 Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. Nearly fifty years ago Nigel Coates writing in my Villa Auto AA exhibition catalogue chose the above quote from Roland Barthes to describe my pathological production of architectural fictions. These were hand-drawn, a… Read More
For AP + AR
20.01.2025
For AP + AR20.01.2025
Long, thin and crisp, sun-bleached, rose-blushed. Thousand-time photocopied notations of notations. Struck-through with highlighter, corrected and recorrected re-negotiated, scribbled and walked across. I walk together with AP e AR, our thin nibbed-shoes picking careful tracks between sharpie chasms. We leak behind us inky trails, to be washed away by the… Read More
The Utzons go to Stockholm
17.01.2025
The Utzons go to Stockholm17.01.2025
‘…my parents went to visit the grand exhibition in Stockholm in 1930. Here the Scandinavian functionalism had its breakthrough in a society of exceedingly ornate style. Here [in Stockholm] they were exposed to a new and simple, white architecture that drew in light and air, one that let in the… Read More
DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph
16.01.2025
DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph16.01.2025
Frontispieces are to do with storytelling and we find a curious example of this at the start of Humphrey Jennings’ posthumously published book Pandaemonium 1660–1886: the Coming of the Machine Age as Seen by Contemporary Observers. It is a photograph by Lee Miller of Jennings himself, a filmmaker, writer and… Read More
Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students
10.03.2025
Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students10.03.2025
– Mary Mitchell
In 1999, I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University studying Architectural History when I undertook a work placement at the university archives. Here I was asked to help organise an uncatalogued collection received from the Patrick Geddes Centre at the Outlook Tower. Within this collection were 12 portfolios. Portfolio 7… Read More
theoretical & imaginary civic & municipal housing urban form DMC student work