Tag: DMC

Etudes des fragments d’architecture

Etudes des fragments d’architecture

Jean-Augustin Renard

Signed and dated ‘à Rome 1777’, this drawing was one of a series of studies executed after the antique by Jean-Augustin Renard when a student in Rome, and later published in Paris in Etudes des fragments d’architecture (1783). The acanthus leaf is ubiquitous in Western ornament. Supremely versatile, it can be deployed… Read More

Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture

Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture

Hans Hollein

The following has been excerpted from ‘Everything is Architecture’, Bau Magazine, 1968. Limited and traditional definitions of architecture and its means have lost their validity. Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication… Read More

Hans Hollein: Infinite Space

Hans Hollein: Infinite Space

Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More

To Read A Drawing (1983)

To Read A Drawing (1983)

Peter Eisenman

What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More

The Continuous Monument

The Continuous Monument

Adolfo Natalini

My sketchbooks show a really typical project called the Continuous Monument. The Monument was a demonstration of the falsity and the absurdity of some of the theories that went on in that period. We started producing images of this sort of continuous monument, the continuous strip of urbanisation which was… Read More

On Drawing

On Drawing

Adolfo Natalini

When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More

Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney

Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney

Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More

Robert Venturi: The difficult whole

Robert Venturi: The difficult whole

Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving… Read More

Henri Labrouste

Henri Labrouste

Barry Bergdoll

The following has been excerpted from Labrouste (1801-1875), Architecte : La structure mise en lumière, 2012. In 1840 Labrouste plays an essential role in a political spectacle in which the stakes are high for the faltering regime of Louis Philippe: the return of Napoleon’s ashes that will be buried in the… Read More

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb

The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

Michael Webb

All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.

A Lung for the City (1984)

A Lung for the City (1984)

Cedric Price

The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More

Ville Spatiale

Ville Spatiale

Yona Friedman

The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More

Believe in books (1998)

Believe in books (1998)

John Hejduk

I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. -John Hejduk Quoted from Such Places as Memory, 1998

Three Projects (1969)

Three Projects (1969)

John Hejduk

I believe in the density of the sparse. The Diamond Thesis is both creative and analytical. It implies new points of view in architectural space. It delineates with clarity the frontal facet of isometric projection in the two-dimensional space of the picture plane of the drawings. The realisation that works… Read More

Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City

Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City

Andrea Branzi

Archizoom describe this ‘hypothetical theatre’ as part of a fluid and unstoppable culture, a non-stop metropolis re-imagined to fit the times, characterised by mobile theatres, unbound books, rooms without plan, unwritten music, … and cities made of voids. For the first time the presentation technique has … become a specific… Read More

The Lost Art of Drawing

The Lost Art of Drawing

Michael Graves

The following has been excerpted from Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing, New York Times, 2012. I personally like to draw on translucent … tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before, and again, creating a personal, emotional connection… Read More

Dismantled Sketchbook

Dismantled Sketchbook

James Gowan

To some extent this is the battleground of the British architectural avant-garde; the incompatibilities of graphics and architecture, the freedom that the former allows and the restrictions that the latter asserts. In recent years, the graphics have got smoother whilst the dialectic has remained largely unresolved. A conclusive project is… Read More

The Open Hand (1954)

The Open Hand (1954)

Le Corbusier

The Open Hand will affirm that the second era of the machine-civilisation, the era of harmony, has started. -Le Corbusier

James Gowan: The Expandable House

James Gowan: The Expandable House

Markus Lähteenmäki

James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More

Zünd-Up: ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system

Zünd-Up: ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system

An element in this Viennese collective’s proposal to extend the city into a newly ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system, this ‘Cortina-Bob-Bahn’ would have ornamented the gardens of the Prater with a drive-yourself roller-coaster tower some 1500 metres high.

A Brutal Matter (1962)

A Brutal Matter (1962)

Walter Pichler

Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives

‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More