Tag: civic & municipal
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons
5 February 2018
Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons5 February 2018
In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, architect Charles Edward Bassett, the design lead in SOM’s San Francisco office, was asked by Betty J. Blum how architectural education changed in the US when modernism became accepted in architectural schools and the Beaux-Arts tradition side-lined. What happened when the… Read More
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19 January 2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19 January 2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing
14 January 2018
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing14 January 2018
The idea of using tape drawings originated for climatic reasons: India goes through a five-month monsoon season each year, and during this time it is very humid. For us this meant that the drawings we were producing, which were printed on paper, had a very short lifespan. Lines would slowly… Read More
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House
23 December 2017
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House23 December 2017
Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More
Aldo Rossi
30 September 2017
Aldo Rossi30 September 2017
In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More
Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)
13 September 2017
Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto (RUR)13 September 2017
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
Dissecting
25 July 2017
Dissecting25 July 2017
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22 July 2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22 July 2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22 February 2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22 February 2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
Michael Webb
1 February 2017
Michael Webb1 February 2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women
31 January 2017
Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women31 January 2017
‘What’s it like?’: the experience of being there in a building is fundamental. That’s why we draw a lot in perspective (mostly eyeballed rather than constructed), because it offers the closest approximation to being there. But… moving through an urban environment formed by many buildings, reading signs, interpreting other people’s… Read More
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre
18 January 2017
Caruso St John Architects: Cultural and Tourist Centre18 January 2017
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
Louis Bricard
8 November 2016
Louis Bricard8 November 2016
The Dominican monastery in the centre of the city of Laval on the Loire was seized during the first year of the Revolution, while an expansion was in construction, and then acquired by the regional government as its seat of administration. In 1803 the medieval cloister and chapel were demolished… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room
4 October 2016
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room4 October 2016
A fresh alternative to the intellectual and formal mannerisms associated with architectural drawings in the West since the age of Leon Battista Alberti, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine’s drawing explores a simple, direct way of communicating a spatial proposition. To access his vision we don’t need to be familiar with the conventions of… Read More
Jean-Baptiste Lassus
1 August 2016
Jean-Baptiste Lassus1 August 2016
After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More
The Imperial Palace of God
9 May 2016
The Imperial Palace of God9 May 2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
A Lung for the City (1984)
27 November 2015
A Lung for the City (1984)27 November 2015
The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More
Salvador Dalí
28 July 2017
Salvador Dalí28 July 2017
There is evidence that Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic study for a building facade is part of a real project, but we don’t know what that might be. The sketch resists interpretation and association, far different from anything else Dalí produced at the time: 1939 – a year in which he has… Read More
sketch elevation art practice theoretical & imaginary civic & municipal DMC