Tag: elevation

Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House

Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House

Andrew Jones

There is no building that tells the social and aesthetic story of Park Lane better than Brook House. From its beginnings as a scrappy country lane (‘Tyburn Lane’) in the eighteenth century, Park Lane rose to become the millionaires’ row of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and went on in… Read More

A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti

A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti

Tuomas Toivonen

Small sauna is part of a peculiar farm, where architecture is important. Sheltered by dense vegetation, the site is located on a steep incline on the edge of a valley grooved by water in a landscape of rolling fields, above the residential building and barnyard of an old dairy farm.… Read More

Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)

Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)

Rem Koolhaas

In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these… Read More

Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures

Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures

Dijana O. Apostolski

When he sat down to make the drawings that form this eight-page album of Roman buildings, Giovanni Battista Montano began by embossing lines onto the sheet with a stylus, straightedge and compass. Using natural black chalk, he then lightly sketched the principal parts and main particularities of the selected edifices.… Read More

The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)

The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)

Esther McCoy

Extracted, with permission, from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, published by East of Borneo Books © 2012. The publication is available at East of Borneo.

Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper

Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper

Brian Carter

This scrap of paper, perhaps scooped up from the floor or a waste basket in Louis Kahn’s studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, shows a single sketch – spidery lines outlining a modest block and strange openings. Beginning drawing in 1958 Kahn searched for a design of a new building… Read More

Shape

Shape

Charles Moore

Shape calls attention to things and their meanings. Architects, whether they mean to or not, give shape to things, and the people who see or inhabit those things, whether in full consciousness or not, respond to these shapes. The dimensions of this response are somewhat difficult to measure, since they… Read More

Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension

Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension

Lionel Brett

The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More

One Thing Leads to Another

One Thing Leads to Another

Richard Hall

Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More

Ruskin: Fairy Tales

Ruskin: Fairy Tales

John Ruskin

We all have a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imagining or picturing of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary respect for this power, wherever we can recognise… Read More

Charles Barry: Good and Bad Manners in Architecture

Charles Barry: Good and Bad Manners in Architecture

David Blissett

Architectural manners are […] known by a quality which money cannot buy, and which can le­nd distinction not only to the greatest building but to the smallest. T. A. Edwards, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture, 1924, Preface, vi. There is often an elegance in architectural simplicity that goes unrecognised… Read More

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Helen Thomas

In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More