Tag: DMC
Surface-oriented
18.12.2019
Surface-oriented18.12.2019
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
17.12.2019
From a Little Below and to the Right17.12.2019
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
13.12.2019
Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach13.12.2019
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
13.12.2019
Aldo & Adolf13.12.2019
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
09.12.2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments09.12.2019
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
07.11.2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture07.11.2019
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
07.11.2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson07.11.2019
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
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
01.11.2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek01.11.2019
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
31.10.2019
What Lies Beneath31.10.2019
‘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
25.10.2019
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s25.10.2019
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
18.10.2019
Tales from the Crypt18.10.2019
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
10.10.2019
Behind the Lines 1310.10.2019
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
10.10.2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10.10.2019
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
07.10.2019
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea07.10.2019
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 12
23.09.2019
Behind the Lines 1223.09.2019
1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23.09.2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23.09.2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’
23.08.2019
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’23.08.2019
The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More
Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan
10.08.2019
Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan10.08.2019
“Form follows fender” In James Gowan’s parallel projections we were particularly interested in their spatial qualities, and how the form could develop. Seen as a negative space, it could be a staggered courtyard. James Gowan used a car shape as a reference. By extracting the theme and duplicating the shape… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24.12.2019
A Dose of Dosio24.12.2019
– Laura Harty
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
DMC plan section survey civic & municipal religion