Tag: civic & municipal
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library
7 February 2020
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library7 February 2020
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament
29 January 2020
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament29 January 2020
Sketch made by Sir Basil Spence at a meeting of the Royal Fine Art Commission in January 1969 to illustrate a scheme for enlarging the accommodation of MPs in the Houses of Parliament made by his assistant Christopher Libby.
A Dose of Dosio
24 December 2019
A Dose of Dosio24 December 2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
Aldo & Adolf
13 December 2019
Aldo & Adolf13 December 2019
And architecture itself? Architecture is still the central theme of Loos’s thought, and among his essays is a piece on the competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, a piece, which, like the one on the Michaelerhaus and ‘Ornament and Crime,’ is essential to the understanding of the meaning of architecture. This… Read More
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’
27 November 2019
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’27 November 2019
I. In a melancholy mood, the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia sat down at his drawing table in the little bed-sit he was renting in Geneva and took up his pencil and a little hardbound notebook to write down his ‘notes personelles / 1905’: ‘At my age, that of forty-three, I… Read More
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s
25 October 2019
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s25 October 2019
Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More
Tales from the crypt
18 October 2019
Tales from the crypt18 October 2019
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10 October 2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10 October 2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19 September 2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19 September 2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984
14 March 2019
Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 198414 March 2019
I arrived in Rafael Moneo’s Madrid office in early 1984. I had graduated from Cooper Union two years earlier and spent 18 months working for Richard Meier in New York. I met Moneo in 1978 when he was teaching at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but I don’t… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm
8 March 2019
Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm8 March 2019
This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More
Behind the Lines 14
3 February 2020
Behind the Lines 143 February 2020
– Philippa Lewis
These are just insignificant sketches, but they remind me of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in 1937; by night it was a unique experience – mémorable. You see, one theme of the exposition was light and water: an expression of what could be achieved with the power of modern electricity,… Read More
presentation civic & municipal public space behind the lines (series) creative writing DMC topographic/cartographic