Tag: DMC
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.
Battersea Redevelopment
22 January 2020
Battersea Redevelopment22 January 2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
Origins in Translation
20 January 2020
Origins in Translation20 January 2020
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13 January 2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13 January 2020
Raymond Loewy’s contribution to NASA was not rocket science. It was one small sketch for mankind. But, like everything the designer ever did, the real significance of these fascinating sketches was outrageously bigged-up by their author. In his blindingly flashy oeuvre, their status is comparable to his (infamous) work for Coca-Cola.… Read More
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
8 January 2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino8 January 2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture
26 December 2019
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture26 December 2019
One of the best-known drawings related to the discipline is the ‘allegory of architecture’, drawn by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen and engraved by Jean-Jacques Aliamet. [1] The original is now in the collection of Drawing Matter. Aliamet’s engraving serves as the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, and was included… Read More
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
Surface-oriented
18 December 2019
Surface-oriented18 December 2019
My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. —Italo Calvino The here in question is a narrow room occupying the top floor of a three-storey house on the southern fringe of Montparnasse. Heavily laden bookshelves and strategically placed objets extend along the… Read More
From a little below and to the right
17 December 2019
From a little below and to the right17 December 2019
There is a characteristic recurrence in Lutyens’ drawings of a quickly sketched oblique perspective in his own hand. Apparently, this is added as an afterthought once the orthogonal image of the building itself has been fully developed elsewhere (sometimes by assistants), and both usually appear on the same sheet. Invariably,… Read More
Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach
13 December 2019
Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach13 December 2019
Two square black-and-white ink and gouache drawings from 1973 by Estonian architect and artist Leonhard Lapin show scenes from a deserted Baltic beach. On a calm white seashore, below the somewhat sinister black sky and the straight line of the horizon, stand solitary objects: two large flat L-shaped figures on… 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
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments
9 December 2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments9 December 2019
The following text was first published in 1977 in an issue of AD Profiles dedicated to the Millbank Housing Competition. Run by the Crown Estate, the competition to develop a site adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge attracted nearly five hundred entries, including proposals from Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,… Read More
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture
7 November 2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture7 November 2019
I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
7 November 2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson7 November 2019
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
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.1955
7 November 2019
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.19557 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
What Lies Beneath
31 October 2019
What Lies Beneath31 October 2019
‘The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be,’ recalled Mark Twain in his 1897 Following the Equator. The travelogue was the result of an 1895 lecture tour that Twain, by then 60, had made of the British Empire… 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
Behind the Lines 13
10 October 2019
Behind the Lines 1310 October 2019
I selected a distant meadow in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself…. No sooner was the house completed than I knew it was not far enough away from everything I wished to leave behind…Later I sold the house and grounds for… 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
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea
7 October 2019
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea7 October 2019
Signora Onvoloni, here is a drawing that might find a place in your cabinet of ideas: ‘a drawing is an idea’ – Gio Ponti, translated by Guido Beltramini [1] All seems simple enough on the face of it, and of course one smiles, just as Gio hoped we might. But… 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
DMC topographic/cartographic presentation civic & municipal public space behind the lines (series) creative writing