Period: c20th
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds
24.10.2016
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds24.10.2016
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
Some Thoughts on Sheds
07.10.2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds07.10.2016
In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More
Malagueira and Évora, Portugal
19.09.2016
Malagueira and Évora, Portugal19.09.2016
– Cathy Hawley and Hugh Strange
School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University This year we have been examining the relationship between the ancient Roman, medieval and baroque city of Évora and the adjacent Malagueira public housing development – some 1100 low-rise units designed by Álvaro Siza from 1977 onwards in the aftermath of the revolution… Read More
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park
22.08.2016
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park22.08.2016
In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More
Notes on the 2016 Summer School
21.08.2016
Notes on the 2016 Summer School21.08.2016
Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Michael Graves
07.08.2016
Michael Graves07.08.2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
01.08.2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation01.08.2016
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
From the Desk of John Summerson
01.08.2016
From the Desk of John Summerson01.08.2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
Ray Bradbury: Letterhead
01.08.2016
Ray Bradbury: Letterhead01.08.2016
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
22.07.2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22.07.2016
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
15.07.2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15.07.2016
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
12.05.2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12.05.2016
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
18.03.2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18.03.2016
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
13.03.2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813.03.2016
– 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)
11.03.2016
Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)11.03.2016
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
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture04.03.2016
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
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space04.03.2016
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)
12.02.2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12.02.2016
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
05.02.2016
The Continuous Monument05.02.2016
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
04.02.2016
On Drawing04.02.2016
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
29.01.2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29.01.2016
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
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24.10.2016
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24.10.2016
– Desley Luscombe
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
sketch projection (axonometric isometric) domestic DMC