Tag: exhibition
Opportunism
2 June 2022
Opportunism2 June 2022
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
While declaring explicitly architectural intentions (especially in the beginning), the enthusiastic appropriation of technologies and techniques peripheral to architecture has been a constant theme in OMA’s work. In 1976, Elia Zenghelis commented on the role of the telephone in their design process. [1] The photocopier and commercial printing would open up… Read More
Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review
26 April 2022
Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review26 April 2022
During the spring and summer of 2021, a two-part exhibition of the work of Zoe Zenghelis was shown in London. The first show was an enjoyably intimate immersion at Betts Project in Clerkenwell. The second, a more extensive review at the Architectural Association. Later that year a thick, crisply designed… Read More
The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression
23 November 2021
The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression23 November 2021
The following text discusses the use of models as an integral part of the architectural process. It is excerpted from Matthew Mindrup’s article on the roles of models in the design of the Sydney Opera House and Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair (arq:… Read More
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review
18 October 2021
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review18 October 2021
Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More
Doodles: Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1984–2000
12 October 2021
Doodles: Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1984–200012 October 2021
The architectural trajectory of James Stirling has always been considered that of the individual genius, whilst acknowledging his close links to certain educational and working companions: his lifetime maestro Colin Rowe; the partners James Gowan and Michael Wilford, and the Associates, Laurence Bain and Russell Bevington. Without diminishing the importance and the inspirational role of… Read More
Architectural Drawing (1983)
22 June 2021
Architectural Drawing (1983)22 June 2021
This essay was first published in the catalogue for Drawings by Architects (25 February – 3 April 1983), held at the ICA in London. A period piece, for sure, the text sits at the cusp of changing attitudes to the display and value attributed to architect’s drawings. In recent years… Read More
Cartographies of the Imagination
4 June 2021
Cartographies of the Imagination4 June 2021
– Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah
Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt
26 May 2021
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt26 May 2021
Review By preserving the trees on the site within his pavilion in the Giardini, Sverre Fehn offered Venice an insight into a unique Nordic sensitivity towards nature and the environment. He tempered the harsh Mediterranean sun to evoke the horizontal light of the Baltic through a spectacularly innovative technical design… Read More
Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages
12 May 2021
Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages12 May 2021
The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing
26 April 2021
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing26 April 2021
How we look at architectural drawings is an inherently complicated topic. The issue arises from what we understand to appear and disappear on the page. The field of architecture has spent little time talking about what we see (and don’t see) on the surface of the drawing itself. One could… Read More
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16 March 2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16 March 2021
The following text is an excerpt from George Dodds’ book Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005), an analysis of the historiography and mythography of Mies’s building and its afterlives. The author reminded the Drawing Matter editors of the text, in response to our publication in June 2020 of an… Read More
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery
5 February 2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery5 February 2021
A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up
17 December 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up17 December 2020
Hair, silky, wavy or coiled, somewhere, is felt by us all. It is one of the first things we play with, we shape and mold, unconsciously or artfully. Beginning as a line, slack and tentative, a hair appears as a strike of fine ink. Collected and carefully teased each strand… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Held Fast: SITE’s Ghost Parking Lot
3 November 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Held Fast: SITE’s Ghost Parking Lot3 November 2020
The scene might not appear unusual at first: cars are parked in a row near a commercial building with pedestrians passing on a sidewalk. On closer examination, though, the edges of the finely crosshatched cars appear softer than those of the building and roads. The cars seem to be draped… Read More
Qamutit Home
22 October 2020
Qamutit Home22 October 2020
Qamutit (Inuktitut: ᖃᒧᑏᒃ): an Inuit-designed sled for transport on snow and ice. This conceptual sledge-house exhibits a catalogue of ideas and perceptions regarding the notion of ‘home’, dissolving the boundaries between building and environment and between building and meaning. To regard a house as a home is to regard a… Read More
Venice Biennale (1985)
14 July 2020
Venice Biennale (1985)14 July 2020
The third edition of the Venice Biennale in 1985, ‘Progetto Venezia’, directed by Aldo Rossi, had two major themes: the priority given to the moment of planning and the comparison with the Venetian landscape. For the 1985 exhibition, architects were invited to display their designs for the ‘requalification or the… Read More
Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)
25 June 2020
Mies: The Berlin Building Expostition (1974)25 June 2020
The following text is excerpted from Oppositions 2 (1974): 86–91. The Berlin Building Exposition of 1931 was the largest of its kind ever to be held. With Teutonic thoroughness every material, every method, every theory that had to do with building was shown in the Exposition. The result of this thoroughness, plus… Read More
Staging Brancusi
15 June 2020
Staging Brancusi15 June 2020
– Sarah Handelman and Asli Çiçek
Sarah Handelman: When we started talking about your work in scenography almost a year before, you were in the middle of designing the Brancusi exhibition, which opened last October at BOZAR in Brussels. Since then I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with you about the kinds of stages that… Read More
Mies: The Horizon
14 June 2020
Mies: The Horizon14 June 2020
Perusing the slides I had taken of the reconstructed pavilion, I found it difficult to decide which way up they went — an artefact of photography, no doubt. Then I changed my mind. It was not an artefact of photography, but a property of the pavilion itself, a property of… Read More
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House
12 June 2020
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House12 June 2020
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
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer
12 May 2020
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer12 May 2020
Initiatief 86 was important because (as Robbrecht en Daem) it was more or less our first real work for art. It was also an important moment for the Belgian art scene. That summer Jan Hoet curated Chambres d’Amis, exhibiting the work of 50 artists in homes across Ghent. At the… Read More
Ruskin: Fairy Tales
22 April 2020
Ruskin: Fairy Tales22 April 2020
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
The Garden of Earthly Delights
9 April 2020
The Garden of Earthly Delights9 April 2020
The essay is an excerpt from Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, by Hamed Khosravi, published by Hatje Cantz. Pre-order through the publisher’s website or visiting www.guevrekian.org.
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review
4 March 2022
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review4 March 2022
– Andrew Clancy
On the morning of 12 April 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit, strapped into a spherical capsule fixed to the top of a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. The first to see our planet in its totality, his words were simple: ‘I see Earth. It is so beautiful.’… Read More
exhibition design art practice exhibition ephemeral architecture