Tag: elevation

Manufacturers Trust Bank

Manufacturers Trust Bank

Janet Parks

When one thinks of Manufacturers Trust Company and New York City architecture, the first image that comes to mind is Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s international style bank building on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street from 1954. By that year, SOM with Gordon Bunshaft as a design partner were the architects… Read More

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Ellie Skinner

This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More

The Poetry of Concrete

The Poetry of Concrete

Lina Bo Bardi

The following text is reproduced from the catalogue to Lina Bo Bardi: The Poetry of Concrete, an exhibition of the architect’s drawings at the Tchoban Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin (1.06.2024 – 22.09.2024). Find more information, and purchase the catalogue, here. I was born in Rome, in Prati di Castello,… Read More

Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto

Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto

Beatrice Lampariello

The design of Casa a Diacceto responds to the principle of ‘discontinuity’ theorised by Lapo Binazzi at the beginning of the 1970s: architecture can only be thought of and realised in fragments and pieces, there is no longer a coherent unity. The pieces are never invented, but are taken from… Read More

The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour

The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour

Saar Meganck

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. A… Read More

Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review

Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives (2023) — Review

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan architect who died in 2003 at 83 years old in his native Columbo, has been justly celebrated for the skill with which he integrated modern architectural forms and materials into the landscapes and built environment of Sri Lanka and Bali. Although he was often labelled… Read More

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Felicia Liang and William Wikström

Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

Ahmed Belkhodja

Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More

Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’

Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’

Anja Segmüller

The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was one of the most frivolous and lavish events in late-19th-century European history. Erected along the Champs-de-Mars, it encompassed a huge, covered arena surrounded by dozens of pavilions and gardens.[1] It was conceived by Napoleon III to showcase of industrial and technological progress, to promote… Read More

The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial

The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial

Colum O'Riordan

In 2001, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) acquired at auction an item described in the catalogue as ‘Architectural Drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park’. The unsigned, undated drawing is a perspective view of an obelisk, the base of which is a four-faced distyle Doric temple. This… Read More

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Janine Barrier

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard’s drawing, while illustrating one of the poems of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reveals a true picture of the progress of architecture. The transformation of Philemon’s and Baucis’ humble cottage, as required by Jupiter, which unfurls before our very eyes, proclaims that in 1769, the metamorphosis of the primitive hut at… Read More

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

Stan Allen and Marina Correia

‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More