Tag: DMC

Alternative Histories: Dyvik Kahlen Architects on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: Dyvik Kahlen Architects on Tony Fretton

A Ruin The sketch is finished and unfinished at the same time, it’s precise and equally ambiguous. In a way architecture should be the same, somewhere between a ruin and a loved space. A ruin understood as a spatial sequence that follows it’s own internal logic, void of an immediate… Read More

Alternative Histories: OMMX on Adolfo Natalini

Alternative Histories: OMMX on Adolfo Natalini

Alternative Histories: Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven Architecten on Ernest Born

Alternative Histories: Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven Architecten on Ernest Born

Treasure Island is an artificial island in the San Francisco Bay and was built in 1937 for the ‘Golden Gate International Exposition’, a World’s Fair on the occasion of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Architect Ernest Born designed various buildings for the fair including the ‘Main Portal’, a… Read More

Alternative Histories: ONO Architectuur on James Gowan

Alternative Histories: ONO Architectuur on James Gowan

Alternative Histories: Murmuur Architecten on Álvaro Siza

Alternative Histories: Murmuur Architecten on Álvaro Siza

We appreciate Siza’s gesture to connect the balustrades to a kind of coat rack or washing wire in front of the windows on the first floor. The panache of the pencil stripe on the sketch is brought to life in the fine red line of the balustrade. He strings the… Read More

Alternative Histories: EM2N on Alexander Brodsky

Alternative Histories: EM2N on Alexander Brodsky

We were fascinated by Alexander Brodsky tentative sketches. Laying line over line, searching for the right position and proportions, he produces drawings that look like an x-ray of a three-dimensional object with multiple layers of lines and surfaces producing a fuzzy depth of space. We interpreted our role similar to… Read More

Alternative Histories: 2A+P/A on Aldo Rossi

Alternative Histories: 2A+P/A on Aldo Rossi

Starting from the analysis of a drawing by Rossi, made for the competition project on the student house in Trieste in 1974 – with the curious title “La vita Calda (The warm life)” – we begun to investigate a series of recurring elements in Rossi’s architecture, especially in his first… Read More

Alternative Histories: Charles Holland Architects on John Lautner

Alternative Histories: Charles Holland Architects on John Lautner

Strawberry Gothic Forever draws on a number of architectural fantasies. Primarily, it can be seen as an anglicised version of Lautner’s house for Edgar Ewing, a circular structure intended for the Los Angeles hills but now embedded in the chalk face of the North Downs. But it also contains other… Read More

Alternative Histories: Stephen Taylor Architects on Robbrecht and Daem

Alternative Histories: Stephen Taylor Architects on Robbrecht and Daem

Our proposal reimagines the Aue Pavilions project by Robbrecht en Daem through an extreme exaggeration and distortion of the original work’s spatial ideas. The ensemble of carriage-like volumes are reimagined as a continuous sinusoidal form which opens up to the park, raised on stumpy pilotis.  Instead of a series of… Read More

Alternative Histories: Rural Urban Framework on Joseph Scholz

Alternative Histories: Rural Urban Framework on Joseph Scholz

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

On Cornices, Part I

On Cornices, Part I

Emma Letizia Jones

In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More

Alternative Histories: Multerer Architekten on Louis Kahn

Alternative Histories: Multerer Architekten on Louis Kahn

Alternative Histories: fala atelier on Louis Kahn

Alternative Histories: fala atelier on Louis Kahn

Supreme efficiency. For the cost of one millimetre of pencil lead, a few careful shapes define the volume, its load-bearing structure, the metrics of the facades and the distinction between services and open areas. We thought five pillars would be enough, and that the rhythm of the elevations would benefit… Read More

Alternative Histories: Havana architectuur on Michael Webb

Alternative Histories: Havana architectuur on Michael Webb

When asked to design a model based on one of Michael Webb’s illustrious drawings of the Sin Centre project for Leicester Square (London 1961) we immediately thought about our project for a 500 cars garage (in collaboration with L.U.S.T. architecten) at the edge of the town of Ghent, which is… Read More

Alternative Histories: BeL on Walter Pichler

Alternative Histories: BeL on Walter Pichler

The selected drawing – a light-hearted but somewhat nervous sketch bearing the title Sketch for Underground City – belongs to an early body of work by Walter Pichler. Working on abstract, hypothetical cities and buildings, Pichler questions the relationship of oppositional systems: positive and negative space, the designed and found object, movement… Read More

Alternative Histories: Smith and Taylor Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund

Alternative Histories: Smith and Taylor Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund

Erik Gunnar Asplund’s 1921 drawing of the gable elevation of Karl Johan School presents a composed, formal, broadly classical and definitely Scandinavian façade. The potential symmetry of the façade is undermined by its off-centre presentation on the sheet, and by its constructed context: the profile of the hipped-roofed building on the left,… Read More

Zaha and Aldo Self reflections

Zaha and Aldo Self reflections

Alternative Histories: Point Supreme Architects on Adolfo Natalini

Alternative Histories: Point Supreme Architects on Adolfo Natalini

Mystery as Ground

Mystery as Ground

Andrew Clancy

I We could start here, with this image in the exhibition Disappear Here, found in Abraham Bosse’s (c. 1602–1676) Maniere universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective. Two men stand looking at a four-sided form projected on the ground. Rather than an orthogonal, universal perspective that privileges one point outside the picture,… Read More

Alternative Histories: General Architecture on Emil Hoppe

Alternative Histories: General Architecture on Emil Hoppe

Task We look upon the drawing of Emil Hoppe as a first draft of a building. The draft has travelled through time and it Is now our task to continue the work from our position. Continuation must be understood as something in between mere acceptance and rejection. For this task… Read More

Alternative Histories: Traumnovelle on Michael Gold

Alternative Histories: Traumnovelle on Michael Gold

The Atom People The sublime despair of not belonging to our own planet’s ecosystems After the apocalypse, the overheated planet Earth is uninhabitable. Humankind creates a new underground city thanks to a machine producing infinite energy. People of this utopian city vow to learn from the errors of the past… Read More

Alternative Histories: Philip Christou on Le Corbusier

Alternative Histories: Philip Christou on Le Corbusier

When asked to participate in ‘Alternative Histories’, I was pleased to be offered the large, elegant drawing by Le Corbusier of his proposal for the Bhakra Dam near Chandigarh, India. I remember seeing this drawing with Florian Beigel years ago in the Drawing Matter archive, and again in an important… Read More

Alternative Histories: Flores i Prats Architects on Alberto Ponis

Alternative Histories: Flores i Prats Architects on Alberto Ponis

We have reflected directly on Alberto Ponis’s drawing without separating ourselves from it, looking for clues about where we could enter with the scissors and fold out the paper with our hands, making the house and the landscape that we saw drawn appear at the same time. We took the… Read More