Tag: elevation
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22 July 2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22 July 2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
A souvenir and survey
22 June 2017
A souvenir and survey22 June 2017
While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… 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
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s
21 March 2017
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s21 March 2017
Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known for their innovative graphic design and spectacular photomontages which… Read More
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother
17 March 2017
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother17 March 2017
In this drawing of his project for a house for a sculptor, Ugo La Pietra tries to criticise the boxiness of the standard house and the context of the city. Working to synthesise the forms and disciplines of art and architecture, he draws an enveloping free-form volume on pillars. This… Read More
James Gowan: Inside the sketchbook
2 March 2017
James Gowan: Inside the sketchbook2 March 2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland
23 February 2017
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland23 February 2017
George Wilkinson (1813/4–1890) was an English architect employed by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1839 to facilitate the construction of workhouses throughout Ireland in response to growing numbers of homeless poor. While historians have written of the Poor Laws and the workhouses, Wilkinson’s contribution to both merits further study in… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22 February 2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22 February 2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc
17 February 2017
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc17 February 2017
This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More
Michael Webb
1 February 2017
Michael Webb1 February 2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
James Malton
30 January 2017
James Malton30 January 2017
Trees and Clouds: the picturesque, perspective and aquatint An early architectural use of aquatint was James Malton’s 1798 book An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle, That Peculiar Mode of Building Which Was Originally the Work of Chance. Malton took his authority from Uvedale Price’s An Essay… Read More
Gordon Matta-Clark
19 January 2017
Gordon Matta-Clark19 January 2017
The Genesis of Architecture (and the Genetics of an Anarchitect) During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single… Read More
Jessie Brennan
4 January 2017
Jessie Brennan4 January 2017
An image These drawings are an act of imagination. Like stills from the filmed footage of a detonation, in each frame a building slumps further down the viewfinder: present, going, going… gone. Or so it seems. On closer inspection, it emerges that the building is still there. It is in… Read More
Aitchison / Prendergast
30 December 2016
Aitchison / Prendergast30 December 2016
This finely detailed watercolour drawing is a perfect miniature representation by George Aitchison of his proposal for the composition of a wall in the morning room of Lord Leconfield’s house in Chesterfield Gardens, London, 1881. The figures that define the room – the door and its frame, the fireplace and… Read More
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence
12 December 2016
Gowan: A rather beautiful coherence12 December 2016
James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23 November 2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23 November 2016
Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More
Louis Bricard
8 November 2016
Louis Bricard8 November 2016
The Dominican monastery in the centre of the city of Laval on the Loire was seized during the first year of the Revolution, while an expansion was in construction, and then acquired by the regional government as its seat of administration. In 1803 the medieval cloister and chapel were demolished… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Some Thoughts on Sheds
7 October 2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds7 October 2016
In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room
4 October 2016
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room4 October 2016
A fresh alternative to the intellectual and formal mannerisms associated with architectural drawings in the West since the age of Leon Battista Alberti, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine’s drawing explores a simple, direct way of communicating a spatial proposition. To access his vision we don’t need to be familiar with the conventions of… Read More
Jean-Baptiste Lassus
1 August 2016
Jean-Baptiste Lassus1 August 2016
After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More
Dissecting
25 July 2017
Dissecting25 July 2017
– Andrew Clancy
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
sketch elevation projection (axonometric isometric) civic & municipal urban form public space architectural drawing summer school DMC