Tag: DMC
Paolo Soleri
22 February 2017
Paolo Soleri22 February 2017
Over an advertisement for a series of workshops in the Arizona desert in 1979 ran the legend: ‘Soleri is in the desert not to escape the city for some pastoral dream but to create a wholly new urban civilization.’ It is not known when he started referring to himself in… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22 February 2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22 February 2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
Michael Webb
1 February 2017
Michael Webb1 February 2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
Superstudio: Cinematography
30 January 2017
Superstudio: Cinematography30 January 2017
It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More
Gordon Matta-Clark
19 January 2017
Gordon Matta-Clark19 January 2017
The Genesis of Architecture (and the Genetics of an Anarchitect) During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single… Read More
L’art tue
19 January 2017
L’art tue19 January 2017
L’ART TUE – Art Kills L’ART TUE was the name of a poster project, most likely between 1975 and 1976. It followed the theoretical and literary Groupe Utopie [Utopia Group] adventure and their publications between 1966 and 1969, and after the Aerolande development work which lasted until 1975. However, it came… Read More
Projected Sections
15 January 2017
Projected Sections15 January 2017
The perspectival and axonometric section: Great Britain, around 1950-1970 As a technique of representation and a design tool, the perspectival or axonometric section acquired a central role in the field of residential architecture during the post war period in Great Britain. Various protagonists, for example Denys Lasdun (Cluster Block), Alison… Read More
Black Airground
23 December 2016
Black Airground23 December 2016
The following text is extracted from the Jeffrey Shaw Compendium. For Black Airground the artists – Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller – positioned three black military surplus parachutes in a row on the floor of the gallery in the Oxford Museum of Art, entirely filling the exhibition space. Weighted around their… Read More
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence
12 December 2016
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence12 December 2016
James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More
Brunswick Centre
5 December 2016
Brunswick Centre5 December 2016
It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More
Charles Percier
18 November 2016
Charles Percier18 November 2016
Design for a Samovar The drawing is preparatory for the samovar in silver-gilt, eventually executed in 1808 by Henry Auguste for Queen Hortense (Les Grands Orfevres de Louis XIII a Charles X, Paris 1965, p. 273). The piece bears the marks of the years 1795–8, and 1798–1809. The design was… Read More
A Public Convenience
18 November 2016
A Public Convenience18 November 2016
Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More
Louis Bricard
8 November 2016
Louis Bricard8 November 2016
The Dominican monastery in the centre of the city of Laval on the Loire was seized during the first year of the Revolution, while an expansion was in construction, and then acquired by the regional government as its seat of administration. In 1803 the medieval cloister and chapel were demolished… Read More
Paul Robbrecht
2 November 2016
Paul Robbrecht2 November 2016
Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24 October 2016
Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24 October 2016
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds
24 October 2016
Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds24 October 2016
Paper by Anthony Auerbach read at the Architectural Drawings Symposium, Shatwell, 24 April 2016. I would like to introduce two items from this collection, or rather two collections our host has brought together, whose cohabitation here prompted me to consider whether they are related and whether the relation can be… Read More
Alexander Brodsky
15 October 2016
Alexander Brodsky15 October 2016
There is someone behind Alexander Brodsky’s unfired clay facades. It might be a housekeeper behind one, a bored Kafkaesque rond-de-cuir behind another. It could be just an architect. They all draw and archive the objects and spaces they discover in these buildings, and reassemble them like an archeologist reassembles what he excavates:… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Some Thoughts on Sheds
7 October 2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds7 October 2016
In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room
4 October 2016
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room4 October 2016
A fresh alternative to the intellectual and formal mannerisms associated with architectural drawings in the West since the age of Leon Battista Alberti, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine’s drawing explores a simple, direct way of communicating a spatial proposition. To access his vision we don’t need to be familiar with the conventions of… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
1 March 2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project1 March 2017
– Tim Abrahams
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
topographic/cartographic presentation commerce landscape DMC