Tag: detail

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

Hugh Strange

This is the third text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. William Lethaby’s second book, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, published in 1894, could hardly have started on its subject more emphatically, ‘Sancta Sophia is the most… Read More

fala: execution drawings

fala: execution drawings

fala

This is the fifth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Construction documents include an array of scales. General drawings, partials, maps, details, and indexes are loaded with intentions and manic descriptions. They are supposed to… Read More

W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman

W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman

Hugh Strange

This is the second text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Dissatisfied with his first book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, a year later William Lethaby indicated a significant shift in thinking with the essay, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’. The text… Read More

How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing

How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing

Federica Goffi and Devon Moar

The bee drawing(s) by Devon Moar illustrate that changes in scale imply a passage of time. One drawing here becomes many drawings, each marking a different moment of discovery unfolding a process. One could say that when it comes to architectural media, there are two types of scales dealing with… Read More

Turning Point: The US Embassy in Dublin

Turning Point: The US Embassy in Dublin

Cormac Murray

This is an extract of the construction drawings produced by John M. Johansen’s office in 1963 for the cylindrical US Embassy in Dublin. It is a three-dimensional ink drawing of the external precast concrete structure, describing two single-storey bays in isolation. Viewed abstractly it could almost be an anatomical study,… Read More

‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

William Burges

The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More

The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection

The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection

Editors

The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.

Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. seeing the detail

Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. seeing the detail

Mikael Bergquist

In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the concept of ‘the Punctum’. The Punctum is something in a photograph that etches itself in the consciousness of the viewer. It is often a small detail that evokes emotions long after the gaze has left the picture: an experience that is born in the viewer’s… Read More

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

George Saumarez Smith

As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More

In the Archive: New and Found 2

In the Archive: New and Found 2

Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New Julia Bloomfield recalls a dinner with Frank… Read More

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

Helen Thomas

‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More

The Pursuit of Gothic

The Pursuit of Gothic

Rosemary Hill

William Gilpin notoriously suggested that the ruins of Tintern Abbey could be improved by ‘a mallet judiciously used’. [1] The next generation saw in the architecture of the Middle Ages something more than an assortment of ornamental landscape features, but it did not begin to understand it. Uvedale Price, whose… Read More