Period: c21st

Blind Spots

Blind Spots

Sam Jacob

Architectural drawing is a strange and powerful tool. It is simultaneously a means of depiction and a way of constructing the world. That’s why, beyond the conventions of practice, the politics of the architectural image remain so significant. The drawing is the world we construct: its own ideas of subject, its modes… Read More

Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House

Florian Beigel Architects: Stage House

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

This photograph was made of a physical model as part of the ongoing process of working on the design. It was made to test the scale and dimensions of the various elements that make up the space of one of two large rooms within the ‘Stage House’, a small shed… Read More

Peter Smithson: Obelisk

Peter Smithson: Obelisk

Peter Smithson’s influence predates slightly that of Cedric Price. It has also migrated to Shatwell, most notably in the recent re-erection of his wooden obelisk that first stood at Hadspen, commanding the view across the countryside. At Shatwell the obelisk takes on a more urban role (the design was originally… Read More

Cedric Price: FIR Project

Cedric Price: FIR Project

Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More

Stephen Taylor: Urban Rural

Stephen Taylor: Urban Rural

The existing enclave of Shatwell Farm has seen a slow decline in its agricultural industry over recent decades, rendering many of its buildings derelict and redundant. The project is seen as part of a process to revitalise the farmstead at Shatwell. Whilst dairy farming is expected to continue and its… Read More

Hugh Strange: the Archive

Hugh Strange: the Archive

Hugh Strange has been involved in the transformations of Shatwell farmyard since 2010. He first entered the conversation as client advisor for an Architecture Research Unit project for a new Gardener’s House on the Hadspen Estate. Although the house was never built, the presence of ARU acted as a catalyst to several living… Read More

Álvaro Siza: Sense Making

Álvaro Siza: Sense Making

Álvaro Siza’s influence begins with the move of the Drawings Collection to Shatwell in 2012. In the same year Stephen Taylor Architects completed the Cowshed and Hugh Strange Architects completed the Archive building.  Well known for his seminal Quinta da Malagueira housing estate (1973–1977) in Evora, Portugal, Siza appreciated the scale of… Read More

Drawing from a Deep Well

Drawing from a Deep Well

Patrick Lynch

I make several different types of drawings in my life as an architect and as a teacher: those made at the speed of thought in B4 sketchbooks, on my lap or at the dining table or on trains or buses; tracing drawings made on bits torn from rolls of detail… Read More

Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)

Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)

Jesse Reiser

Farshid Moussavi’s brilliant call to display architectural working drawings as art in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Show is about as canny a cultural move, vis-a-vis architecture exhibitions, as any in recent memory – and it could only come from an architect. At a stroke she presents architectural drawing at… Read More

Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu

Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu

Jan De Vylder

One cannot see these drawings without seeing the mural by Sol LeWitt, in which an electrician has subsequently installed doorbells and a light switch. The mural is in the entrance hall of a city palace that was for a time the entrance to a gallery. When the gallery stopped its… Read More

Notes on the 2017 Summer School

Notes on the 2017 Summer School

Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed

Drawing, Making, Thinking ‘Working in philosophy, like work in architecture in many respects, is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things, (and what one expects of them).’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Diary, 1931 Nana Biamah-Ofosu: In Wittgenstein’s words I recognise my own pursuit… Read More

Concrete Beach

Concrete Beach

Stephanie Macdonald

This drawing was made with a chinagraph pen over the course of a holiday afternoon. It started out roughly, as a quick sketch, but time stretched out as more people filled the page. I like using chinagraph as it can be sensitive to great softness and also very dark lines. I like its texture – it is a very… Read More

San Rocco

San Rocco

Helen Thomas

This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More

Celia Scott: L’Attente

Celia Scott: L’Attente

Katharine Eustace

Space Stares Back ‘Space’ has come to mean much more than the OED definition, although even there, for such a small word, it has a surprising length, depth and breadth of meaning. It is space that Celia Scott is defining in her ultimately abstract work. As a trained architect with… Read More

A Space / Two Spaces

A Space / Two Spaces

Anthony Vidler

The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate:      Reading     Writing     Sleeping … Read More

Permanence

Permanence

Elizabeth Hatz

Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Maria Conen

A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr

The act of making a physical artefact involves a to-and-fro engagement with an idea, in which decisions are ‘made’ and re-thought, and then un-made before the idea is realised. This roundabout but essential process of adaption is carried out, in the work of my architectural practice, through the use of… Read More

Perry Kulper

Perry Kulper

Sophia Banou

‘Spatial Blooms’ and Digital Expectations Within the currently dominant visual culture, architectural drawing is persistently called to compete with a wide range of digital modes of visualisation, as well as fabrication, that tend towards simulation rather than representation. Is architectural drawing rendered redundant in this proliferation of digital renderings? And,… Read More

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Sketch modelling

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

Hard lead pencils are unforgiving and require concentration, precision and humility when drawing with them. By using a hard lead the painterly effect associated with soft pencil sketches is avoided, with their tolerance to imprecision and visual sloppiness. Sketching with a hard lead requires focus. The joy of drawing a… Read More

Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre

Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre

Adam Caruso

We have been making model photographs for the last twenty-five years, and these images have always skirted between abstraction and concrete reality. They show a world where the atmosphere of our buildings is explicitly evoked at the same time as creating an uncanny sense of the actual size and material… Read More

Jessie Brennan

Jessie Brennan

Olivia Horsfall Turner

An image These drawings are an act of imagination. Like stills from the filmed footage of a detonation, in each frame a building slumps further down the viewfinder: present, going, going… gone. Or so it seems. On closer inspection, it emerges that the building is still there. It is in… Read More