Tag: concept & diagram

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

There is an uncanny gap between the cold precision of a computer drawing and the confusing uncertainty of the design process. We try to bridge that gap with a collaborative method that includes a lot of discussions and the use of computer-prints, scalpel, glue, pencil and Tipp-Ex.  The drawing above… Read More

Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures

Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures

Manuel Orazi

‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More

The Sacred Games of Art

The Sacred Games of Art

Patrick Lynch

These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More

A souvenir and survey

A souvenir and survey

Basile Baudez

While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… Read More

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

Basile Baudez

Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More

Galli da Bibiena

Galli da Bibiena

Fabrizio Ballabio

In 1732, renowned architect and painter Ferdinando Galli da Bibiena published a meticulously compiled document illustrating a theory of perspective for the specific use of the architect and the painter. The book was intended for the students of Bologna’s Accademia Clementina (currently the city’s Academy of Fine Arts) and had… Read More

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

Marcelo Ferraz

Please, draw a hand with three fingers folded and the index finger pointing, so that we can make the signs for the toilets and exits’, Lina Bo Bardi instructed me, but I hesitated. Timid in the early days of my internship and not knowing how to draw, I was being… Read More

Black Airground

Black Airground

Jeffrey Shaw

The following text is extracted from the Jeffrey Shaw Compendium. For Black Airground the artists – Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller – positioned three black military surplus parachutes in a row on the floor of the gallery in the Oxford Museum of Art, entirely filling the exhibition space. Weighted around their… Read More

Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence

Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence

Charles Rice

James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More

The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee

The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee

Helen Thomas

Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More

Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

Anthony Auerbach

Paper by Anthony Auerbach read at the Architectural Drawings Symposium, Shatwell, 24 April 2016. I would like to introduce two items from this collection, or rather two collections our host has brought together, whose cohabitation here prompted me to consider whether they are related and whether the relation can be… Read More

Seven Farmyards

Seven Farmyards

Ville Spatiale

Ville Spatiale

Yona Friedman

The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More

The Open Hand (1954)

The Open Hand (1954)

Le Corbusier

The Open Hand will affirm that the second era of the machine-civilisation, the era of harmony, has started. -Le Corbusier

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More

Haus-Rücker-Co.

Haus-Rücker-Co.

This art collective – we might call them the ‘house thief company’ or ‘house drawing company’– took its name from a pun on the verb ‘to draw’ and an old slang word for ‘thief’. Their projects during this period involved interventions in which a house or building would be ‘stolen’… Read More

Five Boxes

Five Boxes

Michael Craig-Martin

Line drawing — drawing without shading, cross-hatching or chiaroscuro — permits and conveys the most precise sense of accuracy of any kind of drawing. The facts are laid bare, nothing can be fudged or obscured. Leonardo used line drawing for his studies of everything from flying machines to the human… Read More

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

Editors

This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More

Simplification

Simplification

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More