Tag: domestic
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21 September 2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21 September 2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… Read More
On Cornices, Part I
17 June 2019
On Cornices, Part I17 June 2019
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
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974
5 April 2019
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 19745 April 2019
This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… Read More
Schinkel
8 February 2019
Dance Dance Revolution
30 December 2018
Dance Dance Revolution30 December 2018
In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More
TEd’A Arquitectes
15 November 2018
TEd’A Arquitectes15 November 2018
– Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez
‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More
Behind the Lines 7
31 October 2018
Behind the Lines 731 October 2018
Mr. Tassie’s House On June 27th 1807 William Tassie scratched his long nose, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and finished off his letter to Alexander Wilson Esq of Messrs. Dunlop & Wilson, Booksellers of Glasgow: ‘I have been near a twelve month engaged with alterations in my house –… Read More
Bruce Goff
20 October 2018
Bruce Goff20 October 2018
This is an unbuilt house and studio project for two artists in the dry country of west Texas. It comes from a happy moment when architects could see no equation between the unreasonable and the unbuildable. Bruce Goff christened it APARTURE, perhaps a play on the words ‘apartness’, for its… Read More
Behind the Lines 6
13 August 2018
Behind the Lines 613 August 2018
Richard Bentley cracked open the red seal, smiling as he always did at the peculiar crest of a man in a ridiculous long-tasselled hat, and folded out the letter. His mood was anxious; he scratched his head nervously with one hand and knocked over the ink on his drawing table with… Read More
Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’
19 June 2018
Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’19 June 2018
What light may Schinkel’s drawings shed on Building Information Modelling (BIM) practice? In 1806 the young Schinkel was asked to develop a residence design from a set of initial layout plans. He drew a façade section, a peristyle detail and a column capital, before the war began and the commission… Read More
Behind the Lines 5
10 May 2018
Behind the Lines 510 May 2018
Boughton MonchelseaMaidstone September 26, 1828 My lord, Please be so good as to find designs for the lodge that you commissioned, a habitation for your woodman, John Platt. I earnestly hope that it will be the ornament that you desired for your park improvements. I also enclose the books that… Read More
Take Courage
8 March 2018
Take Courage8 March 2018
Architecture is born of experience, yet its realisation depends in no small measure on belief. Most buildings owe their existence primarily to evidence – the demonstrable proofs of the benefits they provide – for intuition must always be interrogated to justify the confidence placed in the architect. But the mysterious… Read More
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon
1 March 2018
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon1 March 2018
– Basile Baudez, Alexandre Cojannot and Alexandre Gady
Built in the 16th century on the banks of the river Seine, west of Paris, the castle of Meudon stands amidst the great French Renaissance monuments that were ultimately destroyed. When it was bought by Abel Servien in 1654, the old castle – built under François I in brick and stone… Read More
Drawings’ Conclusions
8 February 2018
Drawings’ Conclusions8 February 2018
The Campo Marzio project had its origins in a series of drawings done as far back as 1979, when I was a student at Cooper Union. I entered Cooper as a transfer student with a BA already in hand. I was originally placed in second year, but after a semester… Read More
Behind the Lines 2
19 December 2017
Behind the Lines 219 December 2017
An idle (and very fanciful) speculation on the origin of a drawing Gloria Gigliotti, hosiery buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue, looked at the drawing that Paddy O’Neil from the Art Department had bought in to her office that morning. She had asked him, for a quick $5.00 on the side,… Read More
Dogma: The Room of One’s Own
13 November 2017
Dogma: The Room of One’s Own13 November 2017
– Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara
The Architecture of the Private Room These drawings are part of a series of 48 perspectives that depict the ‘private’ room from antiquity to the present day. They comprise a study of the private room as a specific architectural form. Each perspective is taken with a more or less consistent… Read More
Archives, or Ardor
26 October 2017
Archives, or Ardor26 October 2017
Butter, fire, ardor: Roberto Calasso tells us that Vedic India is one of the earliest civilisations and one about which the least is known, having left nothing behind but a few fragments of enigmatic texts about worship and sacrifice. No buildings, no palaces, no traces of temples. Just the simple instructions… Read More
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling
2 August 2017
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling2 August 2017
The very fact that The Builder should publish an article explaining the benefits, the uses and the methods of making architectural models indicates just how novel the concept was in 1895, even in theory. ‘Architecture Modelling’ was the result of the almost unprecedented display of an actual model at the Royal Academy… Read More
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
7 June 2017
Karl Friedrich Schinkel7 June 2017
In his designs for the Tilebein House, Schinkel makes considerable use of different colours corresponding to the nature of the materials depicted. To indicate iron he uses a darkish blue, for wood mostly yellow and, of course, when he wants to show cut masonry (he is building in brick), he… Read More
A Space / Two Spaces
30 May 2017
A Space / Two Spaces30 May 2017
The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate: Reading Writing Sleeping … Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
4 May 2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer4 May 2017
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect
9 April 2017
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect9 April 2017
A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19 September 2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19 September 2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
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