Tag: competition

Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden

Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden

Emerald Liu

The city council of the seaside town Oostende organised a competition for its new casino-kursaal in 1945, and a design by Antwerp architect Léon Stynen was chosen as the winner the following year. Stynen was a prominent name by that time, having previously designed casinos for Knokke, Chaudfontaine, and Blankenberge.… Read More

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Rebecca Siefert

The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More

Tree Speech

Tree Speech

Sylvia Lavin

The following text is the fourth of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More

Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension

Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension

Lionel Brett

The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More

Ruskin: Fairy Tales

Ruskin: Fairy Tales

John Ruskin

We all have a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imagining or picturing of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary respect for this power, wherever we can recognise… Read More

Where Words Fail

Where Words Fail

Cyril Babeev and Matt Page

This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More

Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson

Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson

Francesco Milizia

The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More

Behind the Lines 10

Behind the Lines 10

Philippa Lewis

It was undoubtedly the doing of that ancient buffer Lutyens, Samuel Hardy reflected sourly, as he stared at the pages of the September 1932 issue of The Builder and saw an illustration of the winning entry. It showed Mr Edward H Banks of ‘Villa Desiré’, Downlands Road, Purley, Surrey’s awful concoction of… Read More

Michael Gold: Crossed Swords

Michael Gold: Crossed Swords

A Lung for the City (1984)

A Lung for the City (1984)

Cedric Price

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

The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s

The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More