Period: c20th
Simon Fraser University
01.02.2024
Simon Fraser University01.02.2024
This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31.01.2024
Careful Crudeness31.01.2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29.01.2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29.01.2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review
26.01.2024
The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review26.01.2024
There is an ongoing debate within the field of theology and the arts concerning to what degree ‘theology’ must guide the discussion. Those on one side of the divide argue that unless the terms are clearly staked out within traditional discourses and literature in theology, we do not know what… Read More
Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with Streamers Everywhere
25.01.2024
Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with Streamers Everywhere25.01.2024
– Juan Mercadé Brulles, Jesús Esquinas-Dessy and Isabel Zaragoza
During the process of cataloguing drawings from the special collection of Josep Maria Jujol (1879-1949), housed in the graphic archive of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB UPC), our attention was drawn to a particular drawing, illustrating a festive urban sequence.[1] At first glance, it is a captivating object, simultaneously… Read More
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras
19.01.2024
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras19.01.2024
Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction
10.01.2024
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction10.01.2024
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More
Alberto Ponis, The London Years
14.12.2023
Alberto Ponis, The London Years14.12.2023
I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More
DMJ – The Stereoautograph
06.12.2023
DMJ – The Stereoautograph06.12.2023
The Zeiss Stereoautograph 1914 Bild II is a mammoth device (Fig.1). It weighs over 400kg and has the same footprint as a Smart Car. When it was retired and donated to the Zeiss Archive in 2004, the Technical University of Hanover had to remove part of its roof in order to lift… Read More
On Drawing
30.11.2023
On Drawing30.11.2023
A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More
Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris
29.11.2023
Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris29.11.2023
– Dibujantes CNT and Grand Marnier
Prompted by the publication of Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy’s text on Guy Debord’s situationist maps of Paris, a closer look at two ways to represent the experience of a city…
Guy Debord—An Art of War
29.11.2023
Guy Debord—An Art of War29.11.2023
– Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy
The following is an extract from the book Emmanuel Guy, Laurence Le Bras, and Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Guy Debord: Un Art de La Guerre (Editions Gallimard, 2013), pp. 92–96 published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Guy Debord: an art of war’, presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand… Read More
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines
14.11.2023
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines14.11.2023
I first encountered Heinz Isler’s thin reinforced concrete shells when I saw his presentation ‘Third Decade of Structural Shells’ at the thirtieth anniversary symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), in Madrid, in September 1989. This was the first time I saw his inspirational drawing ‘Natural Hills on… Read More
The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review
13.11.2023
The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review13.11.2023
Dwelling is on the political and architectural agenda of every European country in response to the rise of private housing development investment which has dominated the free market in the last decades, transforming cities and creating a new form of housing crisis. The Renewal of Dwelling. European Housing Construction 1945-75… Read More
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers
09.11.2023
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers09.11.2023
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany
27.10.2023
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany27.10.2023
In 1957, Alvar Aalto gave a speech in Munich entitled ‘Schöner Wohnen’.[1] He referred to his own design, the Hansaviertel apartment block in Berlin—his first project in Germany—as he described the key concerns in the design of the modern dwelling. (The construction of Aalto’s second German project, the Neue Vahr… Read More
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once
20.10.2023
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once20.10.2023
In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More
Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review
17.10.2023
Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review17.10.2023
Now remembered almost only for The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones, architect, designer, writer, publisher was regarded in his lifetime as one of the greats of British architectural and design culture, up with Pugin and Ruskin. Yet of his prolific output of some 60 buildings and interior schemes, nine… Read More
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective
02.10.2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective02.10.2023
This essay discusses three enigmatic one-point perspective drawings. The first was made by the precocious Prussian architect and teacher Friedrich Gilly, the second by Alberto Sartoris as a young student of architecture in Geneva, and the third by the relatively unknown modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. These drawings have been… Read More
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review
29.09.2023
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review29.09.2023
Paul Goesch was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital and, in 1940, murdered by the Nazis. Looking at these intense, yet often playful and exuberant drawings, it is impossible to forget the stark facts of his life. Which is unfortunate, because an exclusive attention to his personal history imposes a… Read More
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman
28.09.2023
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman28.09.2023
Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Garage door trio
18.09.2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Garage door trio18.09.2023
No sooner had I written about the door hook than my mother, sharp as ever at 98, revealed that the original had been stolen, along with parts of the front gate, presumably for their metal value. This hook was definitely her replacement, from Franchi on the Holloway Road, whilst the first… Read More
Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan
12.09.2023
Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan12.09.2023
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. The… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m Going to Get Medieval on Your Ass!
16.11.2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m Going to Get Medieval on Your Ass!16.11.2023
– Adrian Dannatt
‘I’m going to get medieval on your ass!’ Any analogy between the hefty massing of the middle-ages and soi-disant Brutalism is here revived in the bold metal hinges of our garage door, worthy of some château fort. Likewise the solid lead parapet of the roof could well guard a fortress, if also reminiscent of the… Read More
St Mary's Grove (series) DMC detail domestic