Tag: elevation
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
Gowan and Stirling
1 March 2019
Gowan and Stirling1 March 2019
This odd-shaped, yellowed analysis drawing by James Gowan, drawn directly onto heavy paper isn’t dated, and was probably added to years after the drawing was nearly complete. Ellis Woodman describes the drawing as ‘that drawing that James always kept in the box with his sketchbooks’. Unusually, when I first saw… Read More
Boompjes II
28 February 2019
Boompjes II28 February 2019
Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… Read More
Boompjes I
22 February 2019
Boompjes I22 February 2019
In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More
Roosevelt Island
17 February 2019
Roosevelt Island17 February 2019
The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More
Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban
16 February 2019
Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban16 February 2019
Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… Read More
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1
19 January 2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 119 January 2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More
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
Commonplace
12 November 2018
Commonplace12 November 2018
In 1877, London’s Building News reprinted – as the ‘work of two eminent architects, though it cannot be said to be their joint production’ – an elevation, plan, and partial section published by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as a model town house, noting that this supposed ‘London Residence’ had been adapted – with due… 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
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980
23 October 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023 October 2018
– Editors
On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea — what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… 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
Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge
15 October 2018
Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge15 October 2018
The Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Bridge is an unrealised project combining infrastructural and cultural programs: a vehicular bridge between two cities over the Red River, a performing arts building in Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River Valley heritage interpretive centre in Moorhead, Minnesota, and at the centre over the river itself, an… Read More
Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere
9 October 2018
Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere9 October 2018
Frail and delicate, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s drawing of a geodesic sphere floats, without context, in the space of the paper it inhabits. More than the form it reveals, the net of thin, red lines expresses the presence of the space within it. A perspective effect emanates from the central point… Read More
Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics
7 September 2018
Netherfield Scroll Two
28 August 2018
Netherfield Scroll Two28 August 2018
What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More
Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll
28 August 2018
Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll28 August 2018
On 7 April 2018, former members of the Grunt Group – Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones – presented their Netherfield Scroll to Drawing Matter. The 20-foot-long drawing was created c. 1971 for a low-density, social housing estate in Milton Keynes. The following video is a brief… Read More
Netherfield Scroll One
28 August 2018
Netherfield Scroll One28 August 2018
– Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones
The following two-part conversation surrounds the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll – a 20-foot-long drawing created c. 1971 by Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones, otherwise known as the ‘Grunt Group’, for the commission of a low-density housing estate in Milton Keynes. The conversation with Jeremy Dixon… 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
Learning from the tortoise
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 2019
– William Firebrace
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
plan section elevation humour & satire theoretical & imaginary construction drawing