Tag: DMC

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Michael Wolfson

Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… Read More

Alternative Histories: Mikael Bergquist on Peter Märkli

Alternative Histories: Mikael Bergquist on Peter Märkli

Peter Märkli’s drawing of the House in Sargans has an intriguing combination of a rigorous proportional grid and a sketch-like drawing showing the garden elevation of the house. The actual house was designed in 1983 for the architect’s sister. It was built in situ, in cast concrete. The concrete has… Read More

Alternative Histories: De Smet Vermeulen architecten on Bruce Goff

Alternative Histories: De Smet Vermeulen architecten on Bruce Goff

GOFFTOWN Walls cannot just be surfaces. They are mass. Wouldn’t you agree? Sure! But… this much? Can you afford the space? And why layering them twice? First the bricks, and then the ten-brick blocks It is important that all wall heights are related. The steps must be easy to count.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Marie-José Van Hee on Hans Hollein

Alternative Histories: Marie-José Van Hee on Hans Hollein

The construction and layering in Hans Hollein’s drawing reminds me of the Aqueduc Romain de Barbegal in France, which I visited some summers ago. This structure can be found in Hollein’s drawing of the city; for me, it represents a landscape, rather than an urban context.  The drawing comprises three layers.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Hans van der Heijden on Josef Hoffmann

Alternative Histories: Hans van der Heijden on Josef Hoffmann

When I received a tiny sketch of a cottage by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), I found the drawing at the same time intriguing and awkward. Hoffmann’s drawing suggests an expressive roof to the cottage, an attractive theme to me. It is ‘a little house with a big scale’.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Clancy Moore Architects on Joseph Paxton

Alternative Histories: Clancy Moore Architects on Joseph Paxton

‘Every element of its construction speaks for itself alone.’ So wrote Gottfried Semper of the Caribbean hut he had seen in the Crystal Palace, and which he used to describe the four elements of architecture. Paxton’s patent drawings and text describe a fragment of the roof that sheltered Semper, the… Read More

Alternative Histories: Caruso St John & Siw Thomas on Hans Poelzig

Alternative Histories: Caruso St John & Siw Thomas on Hans Poelzig

The charcoal lines of Poelzig’s sketches imply a volume and material surface that is close to the quality of his buildings. Our model attempts to engage with this fusion of formal energy and material alchemy. – Caruso St John

Alternative Histories: dePaor on Hans Poelzig

Alternative Histories: dePaor on Hans Poelzig

The drawing is thinking, the same mark used over and over, up and down, hurdling scales quickly, the pulled edge of the sheet mimics the line.  There is one idea — on the right, closer up — a study after or rehearsal for the three-quarter view bleached out from the… Read More

Alternative Histories: Hayatsu Architects on Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen

Alternative Histories: Hayatsu Architects on Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen

Architecture evolves through material transformations, copying one from another, much like how Greek temples adopted using stone instead of wood. Casting is an act of copying. Bronze is an ancient material used by humankind dating back to the mid-4th millennium BC. It is a ductile alloy which does not corrode… Read More

Alternative Histories: Gustav Appell Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund

Alternative Histories: Gustav Appell Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund

The model examines and highlights the way in which Asplund worked with interior space. Often the interior and exterior of his buildings show striking dissimilarities. His ability to hide unexpected spaces within unassuming volumes has always inspired us. This beautiful plan drawing of Villa Snellman speaks of this, we think,… Read More

Alternative Histories: Witherford Watson Mann on Cedric Price

Alternative Histories: Witherford Watson Mann on Cedric Price

—–Original Message—–From: William MannSent: 17 January 2019 19:22To: cedric@cpa.org Cc: Stephen Witherford; William Mann; Philippa BattyeSubject: Bathat Dear Cedric, We tried to reach you by phone but gather you are still in East Grinstead. So we are sending some drawings instead, hope you are able to open the files ok. There are… Read More

Alternative Histories: baukuh on John Hejduk

Alternative Histories: baukuh on John Hejduk

John Hejduk’s take on Corbusian purism liberates the very same forms from the kind of gravitas there at their inception, in the 1920s. Once pregnant forms – conceived and refined during extensive morning painting sessions – they become in Hejduk’s production, as light as the effort to draw them using a felt… Read More

Alternative Histories: Bosshard, Tavor, van der Ploeg and Vihervaara on Bohdan Lachert

Alternative Histories: Bosshard, Tavor, van der Ploeg and Vihervaara on Bohdan Lachert

Bohdan Lachert’s 1937 sketch is a simple and elegant signage study for a post office in Stanislawów. Compared with Lachert’s more dynamic, constructivist compositions, this façade has a restrained, typographic character – the combination of the signage and ribbon windows is reminiscent of a bullet-point list. For this model, we extended… Read More

Behind the Lines 9

Behind the Lines 9

Philippa Lewis

Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through the… Read More

Alternative Histories: Bovenbouw Architectuur on James Gowan

Alternative Histories: Bovenbouw Architectuur on James Gowan

We had great fun elaborating on the cumulative aspect of James Gowan’s sketch. Gowan drew a procession of different structural features – a conga line of architectural fragments. We reinterpreted the idea on a vertical rather than horizontal axis. The conga line was turned into a tower-like stack. We embraced… Read More

Alternative Histories: De Vylder Vinck Taillieu on Michael Graves

Alternative Histories: De Vylder Vinck Taillieu on Michael Graves

Jan de Vylder records that as a child Michael Graves was given a set of painted building blocks by his uncle. The set was made of wooden offcuts found around the yard where the young architect grew up; they remained with him throughout his career. From: Jan De Vylder Sent:… Read More

Alternative Histories: Hugh Strange Architects on Carlo Scarpa

Alternative Histories: Hugh Strange Architects on Carlo Scarpa

Approximately A1-landscape in size, Carlo Scarpa’s drawing shows a series of studies of an unbuilt theatre project from 1970. A coloured, elevational sketch suggesting a masonry wall cut with slot-like or nearly-rounded apertures, inset with a lighter, framed structure, dominates the drawing. Our eyes are drawn to the details: a… Read More

Alternative Histories: Bardakhanova Champkins on Virgilio Marchi

Alternative Histories: Bardakhanova Champkins on Virgilio Marchi

Had the Zuev Worker’s Club competition (Moscow, 1926) been won by Konstantine Melnikov, and not resulted in the well-known building by Ilya Golosov, perhaps a different strand of rationalism would have emerged in pre-war Italy. This could have extended the earlier speculations of Futurists such as Virgilio Marchi; Terragni’s NovoComum… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More

Alternative Histories: Max Otto Zitzelsberger on Louis Tullius Joachim Visconti

Alternative Histories: Max Otto Zitzelsberger on Louis Tullius Joachim Visconti

Building upon Building Building upon buildings, drawing upon drawings, thinking upon thoughts. If this architectural drawing of Visconti has ever been realised, I do not know. In the end I am only interested in his architectural vision. Construction boards bear ideas and visions, before these become reality. They tell stories… Read More

Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier

Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier

A Rain of Light It is our true belief that light is particles of dust. When light is driven through impurities it intensifies, and we assign it a mineral quality. We feel empowered by the ‘photon theory of light’ by Albert Einstein. – Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, January 2019­

Alternative Histories: Jonathan Sergison on Carlos Diniz

Alternative Histories: Jonathan Sergison on Carlos Diniz

Carlos Diniz’s drawing for Hillrise Apartments represents of another architect’s work. Who this may have been remains unclear. Interpreting the work of others is a common aspect of developing architectural ideas; our many collaborators add to projects through their drawings and models, constantly adjusting arrangements and proportions. On other occasions,… Read More

Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio

Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio

We received a sketch made by Superstudio, the Italian architecture firm renowned for its conceptual architecture works.In the famous 1966 exhibition ‘Super Architecture’ the squared grid is used in a variety of scales from the simplest objects of furniture, such as a table, to an urban landscape.Through a series of… Read More