Period: c21st

The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests

The Craft of Carpentry: Drawing Life from Japan’s Forests

Alfred Mowse

The Craft of Carpentry exhibition at Japan House London is striking for showing an ongoing craft tradition and architectural culture that appears to be both attuned to history and inherently adaptable. A fellow visitor to the exhibition told me about his father who had been a sukiya carpenter, building their… Read More

Protected: Tolerance

Protected: Tolerance

Tom Emerson

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Kasuri Nomad Horizon

Kasuri Nomad Horizon

Mio Tsuneyama

This actor-network diagram traces the journey from raw materials to eventual disposal for Kasuri Nomad Horizon, a furniture set crafted from Bingo Kasuri, a traditional Japanese cotton fabric. Created for the Distillation of Architecture: 家具 exhibition at the Architectural Association School of Architecture from the 17th January to the 7th… Read More

House in Maia

House in Maia

Nuno Brandão Costa

The transformation of a single-family house built on a plot in the centre of the city of Maia was carried out with consideration to its previous condition as a conceptual motif: an ordinary house, with no qualities of note, detached from the city, spatially uninteresting or even, one might say,… Read More

The Eternal Change – The Coming of a Ruin

The Eternal Change – The Coming of a Ruin

Allan Bech Hansen

During the spring of 2024, I was fortunate to spend some time in Rome as a fellow at the Danish Institute. My agenda was to delve deeper into the importance of water in the eternal city—having chosen the Italian capital as the context of this investigation due to the significant… Read More

House Container

House Container

The House Container was designed and converted by Paul Rawson in 2006. Originally sited at Hadspen House, it was moved to Shatwell Farm and used as short-term accommodation for visitors the archive and site.

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Tony Fretton and Ricardo Aboim Inglez

Tony Fretton founded his architectural practice (Tony Fretton Architects) in 1982 in London. He came into international prominence in 1991 after the completion of the second Lisson Gallery building, transforming the street into an urban setting to be absorbed by culture. From his house in London and over two hours,… Read More

Wang Shu: Drawing Uncommon Grounds

Wang Shu: Drawing Uncommon Grounds

Xin Jin

Despite the extensive literature on Chinese experimental architecture that emerged in the mid-1990s after the Cultural Revolution, architects’ reflections on and practices of representation remain under explored. Wang Shu (王澍), recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Prize, is a prominent figure in Chinese experimental architecture. Though widely acclaimed in the West… Read More

DMJ – Of Ends and Origins: Raimund Abraham and the Birth of Architecture 

DMJ – Of Ends and Origins: Raimund Abraham and the Birth of Architecture 

Eliyahu Keller

Origin stories have a unique standing in the history of architectural thinking and imagination. They are textual, visual, and representational devices not only of what architecture aspires to be but of the world to which architecture responds and in which it operates. Effective origin stories produce the subjects which both… Read More

Pembroke’s Archives

Pembroke’s Archives

Alison Turnbull

Alison Turnbull was appointed lead artist for the Mill Lane development at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge in 2020. Drawing on objects from the College Archive and working in close collaboration with architects Haworth Tompkins and landscape architects Tom Stuart-Smith Studio, she has created permanent works for the new interior… Read More

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Bahar Avanoğlu

‘Barely Traced, the true drawing escapes.’[1]  On a late night while reading Latife Tekin’s Zamansız (Timeless or Without Time)–a tale of love embedded in a lake, unfolded within the obscured semblances of a weasel and an eel–I found myself moving my lips, whispering: ‘Frii-iii-er-frii-ii-frii’. As I read the words printed on the paper, I… Read More

DMJ – A Will to the City

DMJ – A Will to the City

Lars Lerup

Nine unfinished drawings from 15 years ago; a text titled Phobos, which later appears in print; a story by Emilio Gadda and a brief encounter with agoraphobes; Denis Hollier’s work on Bataille’s aversion to monuments; Michel Serres’ Rome: The Book of Foundations; Aldo Rossi’s fabricca; Michel Foucault’s panopticism; Borges’ fear of mirrors; 50 years of sporadic visits to… Read More

The Cypress and the Arch

The Cypress and the Arch

Bohdan Kryzhanovsky

The following text first appeared in Bohdan Kryzhanovsky, Architecture After War: A Reader (London: MACK, 2024), 9–24. Architecture in the present is closely related to the past, to culture, and to collective memory. We always build and design in context, and each building grows from the precedents of hundreds of previous… Read More

On Axonometric Drawing

On Axonometric Drawing

Martino Tattara

In the work of our practice, since the very start, we have placed a great deal of attention towards drawing and representation. The recent exhibition in Antwerp—The Urban Villa—is a good example of our work, which is based on the combination of design with research; both of these two activities… Read More

8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense

8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense

Emily Priest

This text concludes a series of studies by Emily Priest that began at Shatwell Farm during her stay on site in September 2023. How do you organise an architectural archive? Should it be ordered alphabetically? Should it be ordered by date? Should it be ordered by size? Should it be organised by type of object? How do… Read More

Drawing on Ideas

Drawing on Ideas

Stan Allen

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

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Luis Callejas

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

Anton Markus Pasing

Anton Markus Pasing

Peter Wilson

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

The Grandest Form: Architects on Instruction-Based Art

The Grandest Form: Architects on Instruction-Based Art

Philip Schmerbeck

The drawing that we selected for this presentation is, in a way, a limiting of information. We’ve extracted everything but the mechanical systems—the hidden, technical layers in our projects. By focusing only on these systems, we find clues to the instructions and the technical requirements that were handed to us… Read More

Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration

Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration

James Payne

On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events,… Read More

For AP + AR

For AP + AR

Kirsty Badenoch

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

Drawing as Travelogue

Drawing as Travelogue

Beth George and Emerald Wise

This is a rumination on memory, perceived worlds, and on drawing as embodied experience and shared conversation. While visiting Drawing Matter, we attended to and later remembered spaces both drawn and physical. Produced on the floor of a roof terrace in Sicily, we moved over the drawn field as a… Read More

Notes on the Visionary Spaces Exhibition at the Belvedere 21

Notes on the Visionary Spaces Exhibition at the Belvedere 21

Emerald Wise

I arrive at the Belvedere 21 after visiting Walter Pichler’s famous farmhouse in Sankt Martin an der Raab, only a few days prior—it is a stiflingly hot day in Vienna and for some reason, I have chosen to walk. I arrive at the Belvedere 21 to attend the Visionary Spaces exhibition that showcases some of Walter Pichler’s works in… Read More

Peris+Toral Arquitectes: Modulus Matrix

Peris+Toral Arquitectes: Modulus Matrix

Peris+Toral Arquitectes

‘We were asked for one image that illustrated our thinking. The half that’s in white shows the final floor plan. The black shows the process, superimposing all the possibilities as we developed the project, exploring different options until the final crystallised version.’  Peris+Toral Arquitectes have been awarded the RIBA International… Read More