Tag: civic & municipal

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Adrian Hawker

In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More

Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more

Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Ivo Martins

In the photograph on the left from 1939, found in the municipal digital archive, Porto’s civic centre is still under construction. The image captures half-paved new roads, with curious people milling around the freshly built City Hall. Viewing this photograph recalls the collages of Fernando Barroso and Mário Ramos, where… Read More

Gurdwara

Gurdwara

Ekam Singh

Sikhism is the fifth-largest organised religion in the world. The gurdwara (a door to the guru, a teacher), sometimes referred to as the Sikh temple, is a place of worship for those of the Sikh faith. As a typology, it is under-explored in architectural academia – thought to be a… Read More

Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project

Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project

Landry Smith

I must say that I was far more riveted by another Mies . . . who, in perfect International Style manner continued to insist on architecture and the production of truth as generated by a set of a priori and universalizing laws, and who was caught up in the entirely… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More

Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams

Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams

Daniel Luis Martinez

In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems. Fully opaque on its east and west… Read More

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Daniel Studer

This drawing of the roof level of a fire station, designed as a student work in 1986, was for the ‘Analoge Architektur’ exhibition at the Architektur Forum Zurich. [1] While the drawing is the work of an individual, it was inconceivable without the competitive and collegial development of a drawing… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More

Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh

Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh

José Oubrerie

Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More

Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh

Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh

José Oubrerie

Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

Peter Wilson

Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More

Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes

Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes

Editors

The way I remember it, a couple of years after the transfer of the ownership of the major part of the paper archive (over which I had been involved, as a kind of mediator), Cedric asked me to help with dismantling the Store Street studio, where he was giving up the lease.… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Níall McLaughlin Architects on Basil Spence

Startha Éagsula: Níall McLaughlin Architects on Basil Spence

Níall McLaughlin

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. The… Read More

A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)

A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)

William Hamilton

Excerpted from ‘Architect and Engineer’ 1936 January by William Hamilton.

New Welfare Island (1978)

New Welfare Island (1978)

Rem Koolhaas

In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these projects are… Read More

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

Aldo Rossi

Two fragments of texts paired with two fragments of process. Writing in the May 1976 issue of Architecture + Urbanism, Rossi reflects on two projects: the Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan and the Fagnano Olona in the Lombardy region. In both of the drawings placed alongside the architect’ s writing, the forms… Read More

L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)

L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)

Elie Delamare-Debouteville

As part of an imagined intervention in the subterranean spaces of the redeveloped Les Halles, Jean Criton’s project describes the new Metro station invaded, in a sinister process of parthenogenesis, by the meat from the Pavillon de la Boucherie, which had stood on the site until its controversial demolition eight… Read More

The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)

The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)

C. H. Smith

The Royal Academy’s 1859 summer exhibition, combined with a number of architectural drawings on display in Conduit Street, left a less than positive impression on critic C. H. Smith. In an article published by The Builder, Smith describes what he sees as a decline in the quality of the architectural… Read More

Charles Barry: Good and Bad Manners in Architecture

Charles Barry: Good and Bad Manners in Architecture

David Blissett

Architectural manners are […] known by a quality which money cannot buy, and which can le­nd distinction not only to the greatest building but to the smallest. T. A. Edwards, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture, 1924, Preface, vi. There is often an elegance in architectural simplicity that goes unrecognised… Read More

Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)

Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)

Teresa Stoppani

Sixteen swim in synchrony. Bright red trunks, blue swim caps, in a perfectly choreographed 4 x 4 grid of bodies in motion. They swim in the shallow pale blue pool that contains them, as it floats in the ocean. They are about to collide with a dock that is too… Read More

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Helen Thomas

In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More

Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)

Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)

Colin Rowe

– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).

Leto Litho Leningrad

Leto Litho Leningrad

William Firebrace

Joseph Brodsky, in his short essay ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’ (1979), wrote: The characteristic features of Leningraders are: bad teeth (because of lack of vitamins during the siege), clarity in pronunciation of sibilants, self-mockery, and a degree of haughtiness towards the rest of the country. Mentally this city… Read More