Tag: DMC
Notes on the 2016 Summer School
21 August 2016
Notes on the 2016 Summer School21 August 2016
Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
8 August 2016
Cedric Price: Bathat8 August 2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Michael Graves
7 August 2016
Michael Graves7 August 2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’
1 August 2016
Alexander Pope: ‘et sibi’1 August 2016
The great poet carefully instructs Francis Bird on the memorial tablet for his father – also Alexander Pope – to be placed in the north gallery of St Mary’s, Twickenham. Pope asks the sculptor to record his own respect for his father, to leave a space for his mother’s name… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
1 August 2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation1 August 2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
From the Desk of John Summerson
1 August 2016
From the Desk of John Summerson1 August 2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
Jean-Baptiste Lassus
1 August 2016
Jean-Baptiste Lassus1 August 2016
After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More
Fontaine: Market Stalls
1 August 2016
Fontaine: Market Stalls1 August 2016
The following text is an excerpt from a conference paper given by Basile Baudez as part of the Rencontres du Centre André Chastel, Paris, May 2016. The ‘History of Colour in Architectural Drawing, 16th–19th Centuries’ is part of a forthcoming book. Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing… Read More
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
1 August 2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor1 August 2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means,… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22 July 2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22 July 2016
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15 July 2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15 July 2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
François-Joseph Bélanger
4 June 2016
François-Joseph Bélanger4 June 2016
This drawing is one of more than twenty alternative designs for a room in the Paris mansion built for Anne-Victoire Dervieux opera dancer and, from 1794, the architect and designer Bélanger’s wife. Bélanger imagines for Dervieux a scheme of ‘Etruscan’ arabesques loosely inspired by the archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part II
31 May 2016
Future Scenarios, Part II31 May 2016
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
FRAGMENTS: THE BUILDING SITE AND THE RUIN Louis-Jean Desprez turns to another legendary city of the ancient world — Alexander’s capital in Egypt — to advocate in a dream view of Alexandria in construction what great ambitions might be aroused in the new king of Sweden, after his predecessor, who… Read More
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad
12 May 2016
Robert Bray: Six Designs for a Playboy Penthouse Pad12 May 2016
Published in 1970, fourteen years after the first Playboy Pad of 1956, and with ‘a new decade dawning’, this penthouse design by Robert Bray was presented as ‘the pinnacle of urban living’, combining ‘the latest technological and architectural advances with an idea as old as the hills’: Roman houses that were built… Read More
The Imperial Palace of God
9 May 2016
The Imperial Palace of God9 May 2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
Ducros: Arch of Titus
1 May 2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus1 May 2016
This drawing by the Swiss artist Abraham-Louis-Alphonse Ducros — a preliminary sketch with a deep perspectival view of the Arch of Titus in Rome, and inspired by Panini’s Arch of Titus, 1745 — is the basis for one of his standard images, a definitive view of Rome sold to eighteenth-century… Read More
The Birth of the Column
7 April 2016
The Birth of the Column7 April 2016
The following text is excepted from an interview with Kate Goodwin, in: Sensing Spaces, Architecture Reimagined, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. All drawings are by Álvaro Siza, 2013–2014, for the design, placement and installation of three columns in precast yellow concrete, first in the courtyard of Burlington House and then in… Read More
Robert Mylne
1 April 2016
Robert Mylne1 April 2016
There are two sons of Deacon Mylne’s in Rome at present, studying architecture. One of them had studied in France and has accordingly that abominable taste to perfection: the other, who came straight from Scotland, has made great progress and begins to draw extremely well, so that if he goes… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18 March 2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18 March 2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
13 March 2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813 March 2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park
22 August 2016
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park22 August 2016
– Nicholas Olsberg
In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More
projection (axonometric isometric) presentation memorial & monument DMC