Period: c21st

Shatwell Farm: Appendages

Shatwell Farm: Appendages

Emily Priest

This text is the third in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. We regularly speak of reusing and refurbishing at the scale of a building but talk less about small gestures of fixing and repair. As secondary or even… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the fifth and final in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Sheds and Silos

Shatwell Farm: Sheds and Silos

Emily Priest

This text is the second in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. Shatwell sits on dusty yellow Bridport sand encircled by limestone. Most of the farm’s ground is flat, except for its western edge, which creeps up… Read More

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (2022) — Review

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image (2022) — Review

Liam Ross

In Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers Sociologist David Turnbull reflects on the way technologies of drawing shape thought and action.[1] Cathedrals got built prior to international agreement on common units of measure, often without agreed plans, and without those people we now call architects. What scope for improvisation did individual masons… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Cars

Shatwell Farm: Cars

Emily Priest

This text is the first in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. I first came to Shatwell Farm on a wintery November morning in 2022 to see the drawing archive with some friends. On arrival, Niall recommended… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the fourth in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review

Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

In 1977, two years into the city’s fiscal crisis, I moved to New York City—a young architecture student, ready to take in everything the metropolis had to offer. What I found was a city scarred by garbage strikes, the blackout, and a serial killer calling himself the Son of Sam.… Read More

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Peter Wilson

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

Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation  

Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation  

Jarne Geenens and Elizabeth Merrill

Francesco di Giorgio’s autograph manuscript of machine design, the Opusculum de architectura is among the most enigmatic records of early modern architecture.[1] Dedicated to Duke Federico da Montefeltro, the compact vellum manuscript celebrates the art and ingenuity of technical design, while simultaneously capturing the energy and ambition of the fabled… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the third in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed by Kieran from a… Read More

Return to the Archive

Return to the Archive

Hans-Dieter Nägelke

In the mellow warmth of September 2023, I, in my capacity as the Director of the Museum of Architecture at the Technical University Berlin, found myself in the unpretentious village of Mikoszewo, Poland. There, where the Vistula River gracefully concludes its journey into the arms of the sea, I stood,… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the second in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Connor Street: Made by Many Hands

Kieran Hawkins

The following text is the first in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Alberto Johnsson, Arthur Masure, Daniel Nitsche, Toby Pullen and Alexander Turner

During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of… Read More

Remembering Architecture

Remembering Architecture

Fraser Stables

This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More

Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing

Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing

Bahar Avanoğlu

The following notes reflect on a first year teaching studio led by Bahar Avanoğlu at Istanbul Bilgi University. The studio took Niall McLaughlin’s Alternative Histories model, an interpretation of a sketch by Basil Spence for extending the Houses of Parliament in London, as a starting point to continue a chain… Read More

Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities

Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities

Janos Gat

Judit Reigl was ninety-two years old in 2015 when she started Dance of Death, her transcendent series of small-scale vanitas drawings. Having reached a stage where she could barely see her own pencil marks, Reigl found skulls to be a ready subject. She said she had drawn many skulls in… Read More

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Timothy Christian Murphy

‘Work with your hands, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.’1 Thess. 4:11-12 All architecture begins with our hands. We make physical what we understand in order to communicate the invisible to the outside world. The translation… Read More

Elbe and Marte

Elbe and Marte

Karen Lohrmann and Stefano de Martino

Elbe and Marte is the spatial and ecological adjustment of a 16th-century rural complex and experimental landscape in the Gulf of Naples. Set deep into the coastal hillside, it encompasses a massive work of geo-engineering with rock and stone walls across 30 vertical terraces. It is a survey of time… Read More

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Matt Page

Fraser Stables speaks quietly through his series Remembering Architecture. There is a staid documentarian quality to his photographs, but not that of architectural photography. When architectural details—the meeting of nature and architecture, light falling on surfaces—are made the focus, the images speak more to a sensitive process of recording moments; and in many… Read More

Designs on Democracy (2022) – Review

Designs on Democracy (2022) – Review

Ellis Woodman

‘This is not a book in which material has been selected on the basis of taste; quite the contrary. These are not buildings or personalities with which it has been easy to empathise, and I hope that this book is not read as a defence or an apology.’  With these words the… Read More

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Various

Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More

Poetry and Architecture (2023) — Review

Poetry and Architecture (2023) — Review

Peter Carl

The concluding section of Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics considers ‘the general types of art’ that constitute the self-unfolding of ‘the Ideal, as the true Idea of beauty’, and ranks them in ascending order: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry. Poetry (dependent upon sensuous manifestation, so not yet philosophy) is made… Read More

What Does a Drawing Sound Like?

What Does a Drawing Sound Like?

Brian Carter

Drawings in Mechanization Takes Command almost clank. Designs for a threshing machine in the 1770s, plans for a Mechanical Reaper submitted to the British Patent Office in 1811, and Cyrus McCormick’s subsequent design for the American farmer, all included iron wheels, heavy plate, and flailing chains. Those drawings selected by… Read More