Tag: industry & infrastructure
Banham in Buffalo
13 May 2024
Banham in Buffalo13 May 2024
[Our] main emphasis in this course has been on using primary sources in studying architectural history. By this I mean that we have been using the building itself as the first source of information about the history of the building.[1] Reyner Banham moved to America in 1976 to take up… Read More
Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan
12 September 2023
Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan12 September 2023
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. The… Read More
Owen Luder: Practice at Work
3 January 2023
Owen Luder: Practice at Work3 January 2023
The day-to-day workings of a practice such as OLP fall into two separate yet overlapping sectors: administration and job organisation. Unless these two are properly related and maintained, no amount of design talent, no amount of entrepreneurial vigour or personal charm will keep the practice alive and flourishing. For, despite… Read More
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron
14 July 2022
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron14 July 2022
This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More
Charles Stanley Peach: Pioneer in Power
8 February 2022
Charles Stanley Peach: Pioneer in Power8 February 2022
Charles Stanley Peach set up his architectural practice in 1884, just as the public’s access to electricity was established. Through his contacts in the engineering world, he became involved in designing power supply infrastructure, including Brown Hart Gardens, a substation and Italianate garden in Mayfair. The following excerpt is taken… Read More
The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish
10 May 2021
The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish10 May 2021
A phenomenological reading of ‘bridge’ would not prioritise function (crossing) but this suspended moment. – Peter Wilson [1] A fish out of water, a lady in thought, floating ‘wilderness’. Things first have to be separated from each other so as to be united later on. [2] Peter Wilson’s drawings of… Read More
Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center
1 February 2021
Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center1 February 2021
The landmark skyscrapers of SOM, the deconstructivism of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and the corporate modernist master plan of the World Trade Center all have something in common: long before they were constructed, they were represented in drawings by Carlos Diniz. In 1962, the architect Minoru Yamasaki hired Diniz… Read More
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic
13 January 2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13 January 2021
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: The Best Future
2 November 2020
Writing Prize 2020: The Best Future2 November 2020
When James Wines was commissioned to design a series of big-box-retail sheds for ‘Best Products’—a now defunct chain of mail-order catalogue showrooms—it couldn’t have seemed illustrious. A shed’s objective is to enclose maximum space for minimum cost. The only real design element is the front facade, typically topped with a… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31 August 2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31 August 2020
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti
30 July 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti30 July 2020
This is the first in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of the drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio writes of his own experience as a tutor and… Read More
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica
7 July 2020
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica7 July 2020
– Paul Cox
My parents Oliver and Jean Cox were devoted ‘Jamaicophiles’, having worked on many projects in the country since the 1960s. One of the most enduring and absorbing was a proposed redevelopment of Port Royal as a renewal and upgrade of the historic city, rebuilding and restoring while making an interesting… Read More
Battersea Redevelopment
22 January 2020
Battersea Redevelopment22 January 2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
What Lies Beneath
31 October 2019
What Lies Beneath31 October 2019
‘The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be,’ recalled Mark Twain in his 1897 Following the Equator. The travelogue was the result of an 1895 lecture tour that Twain, by then 60, had made of the British Empire… 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
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19 January 2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19 January 2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Cedric Price: FIR Project
12 October 2017
Cedric Price: FIR Project12 October 2017
Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More
The Drawing as Actor
5 September 2017
The Drawing as Actor5 September 2017
In two publications about post-war reconstruction, How should we rebuild London? (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1945) and Die Stalinallee Nationales Aufbauprogramme (Verlag Der Nation Berlin, 1952), the planning ferment in London and Berlin becomes a performance in itself, revealed through the choice of the media and subjects which they each adopt for illustration.… Read More
Permanence
18 April 2017
Permanence18 April 2017
Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More
A Public Convenience
18 November 2016
A Public Convenience18 November 2016
Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
8 August 2016
Cedric Price: Bathat8 August 2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… 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
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