Tag: memorial & monument

Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture

Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture

Valerio Paolo Mosco

What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More

The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial

The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial

Colum O'Riordan

In 2001, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) acquired at auction an item described in the catalogue as ‘Architectural Drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park’. The unsigned, undated drawing is a perspective view of an obelisk, the base of which is a four-faced distyle Doric temple. This… Read More

A Gentler Giant

A Gentler Giant

Leif Findlay

Faced with the grand statues of Ramesses II in Abu Simbel, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi wrote ‘We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so… Read More

Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more

Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Lenin’s Tomb, the Second Version

Lenin’s Tomb, the Second Version

Niall Hobhouse and Markus Lähteenmäki

The following email exchange took place between Niall Hobhouse, founder of Drawing Matter, and Markus Lähteenmäki in July 2022. Dear Markus, Came across these here in the archive… from god knows where exactly. Thought you might have something to say – had forgotten that it was originally ‘dummied’ in wood.… Read More

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Matthew Blunderfield and Markus Lähteenmäki

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Markus Lähteenmäki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia. … Read More

Power & Public Space 7: Mabel O. Wilson – Memorial to Enslaved Labourers, University of Virginia

Power & Public Space 7: Mabel O. Wilson – Memorial to Enslaved Labourers, University of Virginia

Matthew Blunderfield and Mabel O. Wilson

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: In 2020 The Memorial to Enslaved Labourers opened at the University of Virginia, designed as a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Mabel O.… Read More

Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue

Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue

Matthew Blunderfield and Manuel Herz

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one… Read More

The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves

The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves

André Tavares

In 1586 Domenico Fontana completed the extraordinary task, commissioned by Pope Sixtus V, of moving the Vatican obelisk. The structure was said to have a ‘mysterious magic of an unknown civilization’, accepted by Christians due to the belief that it had witnessed the martyrdom of Saint Peter. In this text, André… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Savinien Petit’s Chapelle a deux salles avec luminaire

Writing Prize 2021: Savinien Petit’s Chapelle a deux salles avec luminaire

Raphael Haque

When art crosses paths with the language of architecture, odd things can occur. Savinien Petit was an academic painter who is little-known today. Conventional even for his own time, his taste at times did not exceed drawing children in clouds, but mostly he created religious scenes in traditional frescoes for churches, work which was… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Grace Mortlock and David Neustein

This is the fifthteenth 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 drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio talks to Grace Mortlock and David Neustein of the Sydney-based practice Other Architects… Read More

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Olivier Bellflamme

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

Eric Gill On Designing War Graves (1919)

Eric Gill On Designing War Graves (1919)

Eric Gill

In 1918, when the First World War ended, Eric Gill was in his late forties and completing the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. He was soon in demand to design and sculpt war memorials. Gill would create simple memorials listing the names of the fallen for both the… Read More

Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review

Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review

Editors

Niall Hobhouse writes about The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones. To purchase the book, click here. Green Park, a pair of anecdotes: 1. Queen Caroline – ‘What would it cost, Sir Robert, to close the Park to the public?’ Walpole – ‘May it please your Majesty, but Three Crowns –… Read More

Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center

Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center

Sam van Strien

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

Writing Prize 2020: Architectural Apparitions

Writing Prize 2020: Architectural Apparitions

Anahat Chandra

Some dreams are never meant to see the light of day. Like a wild design that continually finds itself at the bottom of the roster, patiently waiting its turn to be a part of the city’s skyline, it either promises to burn a hole in the pocket of the investor,… Read More

Superstudio: Monument Interrupted

Superstudio: Monument Interrupted

Julian Lewis

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

The Story of the Pool (1978)

The Story of the Pool (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

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

Aldo Rossi

Two fragments of texts paired with two fragments of process. Writing in the May 1976 issue of Architecture + Urbanism, Rossi reflects on two projects: the Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan and the Fagnano Olona in the Lombardy region. In both of the drawings placed alongside the architect’ s writing, the forms… 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 San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects

The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects

Stefano Corbo

I An abandoned house – a derelict phantom with no roof and no windows – reveals the twofold condition of architecture as image and as form. In San Cataldo, the image and form of death. As image: from afar, a metaphysical de Chirican presence, suspended between Adolf Loos’s project in… Read More

Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche

Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche

Richard Hollis

Count Harry Kessler – the German aristocrat, publisher, patron and friend of seemingly everyone in the European avant-garde – had long had in mind a worthy monument to his idol, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose seventieth birthday would be celebrated on 15 October 1914. Beginning in February 1911, Kessler began sending letters… Read More

Ugliness and Judgment

Ugliness and Judgment

Timothy Hyde

In the summer of 1740, John Wood the Elder ventured his first study of the lithic monuments that surrounded his native city of Bath, drawing sketches of the stones at Stanton Drew. These earned him the patronage of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, which enabled Wood to undertake more… Read More

Behind the Lines 8

Behind the Lines 8

Philippa Lewis

Annette Berthe Schlegel, wife of Adalbert, mother of Mariana, Friedrich, Werner and Elmira, and grandmother to little Wilhelm and Lydia, died peacefully in her cherry wood bed at home in Marienstrasse, Stuttgart, on March 29th, 1812. Adalbert, a successful watchmaker, had held Annette dear, and two weeks after the funeral… Read More