Period: c20th
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
1 August 2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation1 August 2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
Ray Bradbury: Letterhead
1 August 2016
Ray Bradbury: Letterhead1 August 2016
Dear Al: Just a note to tellyou not to worrryif one box of books is a bit late arriving.I sent one box out last week, but the otherwas delayed getting to the P. O. until today.So, both are on their way, but one willarrive much later. Best, as ever, Ray
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22 July 2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22 July 2016
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15 July 2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15 July 2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad
12 May 2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12 May 2016
Published in 1970, fourteen years after the first Playboy Pad of 1956, and with ‘a new decade dawning’, this penthouse design by Robert Bray was presented as ‘the pinnacle of urban living’, combining ‘the latest technological and architectural advances with an idea as old as the hills’: Roman houses that were built… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18 March 2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18 March 2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
13 March 2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813 March 2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)
11 March 2016
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)11 March 2016
The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture
4 March 2016
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture4 March 2016
The following has been excerpted from ‘Everything is Architecture’, Bau Magazine, 1968. Limited and traditional definitions of architecture and its means have lost their validity. Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication… Read More
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space
4 March 2016
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space4 March 2016
Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More
To Read A Drawing (1983)
12 February 2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12 February 2016
What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More
The Continuous Monument
5 February 2016
The Continuous Monument5 February 2016
My sketchbooks show a really typical project called the Continuous Monument. The Monument was a demonstration of the falsity and the absurdity of some of the theories that went on in that period. We started producing images of this sort of continuous monument, the continuous strip of urbanisation which was… Read More
On Drawing
4 February 2016
On Drawing4 February 2016
When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney
29 January 2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29 January 2016
Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole
22 January 2016
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole22 January 2016
Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving… Read More
Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)
15 January 2016
Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)15 January 2016
The following is excerpted from Two Continuous Monuments, by Nicholas Olsberg. Published in the AA Files No. 71, 2015. The architect’s guiding idea has been to create a building which would ‘literally tend to disappear – becoming one with the landscape’ … The dramatic architectural concept and primarily coniferous flora… Read More
Michael Webb: Sin Centre
5 December 2015
Michael Webb: Sin Centre5 December 2015
The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More
View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)
4 December 2015
View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)4 December 2015
All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.
A Lung for the City (1984)
27 November 2015
A Lung for the City (1984)27 November 2015
The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More
Ville Spatiale
20 November 2015
Ville Spatiale20 November 2015
The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings
15 November 2015
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings15 November 2015
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More
Believe in books (1998)
13 November 2015
Believe in books (1998)13 November 2015
I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. -John Hejduk Quoted from Such Places as Memory, 1998
From the Desk of John Summerson
1 August 2016
From the Desk of John Summerson1 August 2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
humour & satire correspondence letters ephemera DMC