Tag: furniture & object design
Hardman & Co.
9 June 2023
Hardman & Co.9 June 2023
My interest in seeing the Hardman & Co. drawings at Drawing Matter was quite personally motivated as I feel a connection to the company. Partially, because I come from Birmingham where the company was based, and because I visited the studios informally in the 1980s with my parents. I was… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31 March 2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31 March 2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education
13 January 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education13 January 2023
This is the fourth text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. The building sites of London in the late nineteenth century desperately lacked adequate skills, and this need was being addressed neither on the job nor through appropriate training. The first prospectus of… Read More
Objects That Meet
15 August 2022
Objects That Meet15 August 2022
Revered objects that move about in design circles and are found in publications, museums, and galleries earn their status through persistence over time. Take two famous chairs, Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue chair of 1918–23 and Thomas Lee’s Adirondack chair of 1903. All chairs have met just by being chairs, but… Read More
Decoding Wittgenstein’s Stonborough Villa
18 January 2022
Decoding Wittgenstein’s Stonborough Villa18 January 2022
God does not reveal himself in the world. The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance. — Ludwig Wittgenstein [1] In the 1980s, the beginning of widespread personal computing, we didn’t buy readymade software like today. Every night found me frantically writing a thousand lines… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks
22 November 2021
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks22 November 2021
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza
These films were made over four hours on the afternoon of Sunday 25 March 2018 in Álvaro Siza’s studio in Rua do Aleixo outside Porto. I had flown to Portugal that morning with the seven sketchbooks which we were to look through with Manuel Montenegro. Manuel and I had conceived… Read More
The Metropolitan Opera House, NYC: Invisible guests
15 October 2021
The Metropolitan Opera House, NYC: Invisible guests15 October 2021
The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.– Czesław Miłosz, from Ars Poetica? My father, Tad Leski, was an architect and designer for Wallace… Read More
On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts
13 July 2021
On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts13 July 2021
Along with his Do Hit Chair (2000), a pristine stainless steel box measuring 1000 x 700 x 750 mm, Dutch-born designer Marijn van der Poll supplies a sledgehammer. In an act of brute physical force he requires the user to expressively sculpt his own seating morphology, not only allowing but… Read More
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal
24 May 2021
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal24 May 2021
It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More
Thomas Chippendale and Ornament
13 January 2021
Thomas Chippendale and Ornament13 January 2021
‘[Ornament] omitted at pleasure,’ wrote Thomas Chippendale in a guide to his revolutionary The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director, the first furniture pattern book of its kind. Although initially considered an advertising tool, it quickly became an invaluable manual for craftsmen, with its clear dimensions and rigorously proportioned pieces open… Read More
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)
10 July 2020
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)10 July 2020
From a letter to The Times of April 18, 1929: At this season of the resurrection of Nature — that ever-fresh miracle — one thing happens that even keen bird-lovers seem hardly to appreciate to the full. I mean the birds’ Morning Hymn. We have all heard vaguely about ‘Bird… Read More
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier
19 February 2020
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier19 February 2020
A Chevrolet Truck
20 January 2020
A Chevrolet Truck20 January 2020
It was the architect Philip Johnson who first compared cars to statuary. In the ‘Eight Automobiles’ show he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, he coined the expression ‘rolling sculpture’. Johnson was good at coinages: two decades before he had given us ‘the International Style’ to describe… Read More
Espelho Álvaro
15 January 2020
Espelho Álvaro15 January 2020
This mirror was among the objects, sketches and photographs at his great exhibition at Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea. Siza was in a corner of the hall with some friends. More than a thousand guests from the Milano-bene (well-to-do Milanese) had come for a vernissage with fur coats, television spotlights, beautiful women, men… Read More
Surface-oriented
18 December 2019
Surface-oriented18 December 2019
My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. —Italo Calvino The here in question is a narrow room occupying the top floor of a three-storey house on the southern fringe of Montparnasse. Heavily laden bookshelves and strategically placed objets extend along the… Read More
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture
7 November 2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture7 November 2019
I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.1955
7 November 2019
Giò Ponti: Plan chest designs, c.19557 November 2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22 August 2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22 August 2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
Charles Percier
18 November 2016
Charles Percier18 November 2016
Design for a Samovar The drawing is preparatory for the samovar in silver-gilt, eventually executed in 1808 by Henry Auguste for Queen Hortense (Les Grands Orfevres de Louis XIII a Charles X, Paris 1965, p. 273). The piece bears the marks of the years 1795–8, and 1798–1809. The design was… Read More
The Poetry of Concrete
17 June 2024
The Poetry of Concrete17 June 2024
– 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
culture industry & infrastructure theatre sketch plan elevation detail furniture & object design