Tag: Open Call: Storytellers, Observed

Protected: Swimming in pixel fuzz

Protected: Swimming in pixel fuzz

Will Fu

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Notes on Nabokov

Notes on Nabokov

Michael Becker

Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More

Protected: PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an ideo-aesthetic technique

Protected: PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an ideo-aesthetic technique

Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

John Hejduk’s Farm Library

John Hejduk’s Farm Library

Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh

Farm Library is one among the sixty-eight entities that John Hejduk designed for the Lancaster/Hanover Masque. It is a primitive round object, with a spiral staircase positioned in its centre, running from the ground to the top. The bookshelves of the library are aligned with the boundary of the building, maintaining a distance… Read More

A Bath for Immortality

A Bath for Immortality

Clara Maria Puglisi

It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

Alison Bartlett

The ladder, a seemingly unexceptional instrument within the array of futuristic and utopian architectural schemes, sits front and centre; the protagonist of not only this drawing but of Constant’s almost two-decade-long project, spanning 1956–1974, entitled ‘New Babylon’. Propped somewhat haphazardly against a series of horizontally-connected and vertically-angled planes, it exudes… Read More

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Gareth Griffiths

On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More

Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded

Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded

Julian Escudero Geltman

Andrea Branzi died on 9 October 2023 aged 84. The impact of one of his seminal works, No-Stop City, has been felt far and wide within architectural discourse. Since its production between 1967 and 1972, the drawings and collages of No-Stop City have haunted the camps within architectural academia that… Read More

Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum

Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum

Malcolm Reading

You can stand on the balcony of Philip Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum today and see the same view of Fort Worth that Helmut Jacoby drew up in 1960. Not much has changed. Apart from the fanciful New-Mexican art in the foreground (his invention), the same hot Texan sun, the same… Read More

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nanase Shirokawa

‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Felicia Liang and William Wikström

Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More

Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault

Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault

Ludo Groen

If you really want to hear about where to find the mountain vaults of Swiss banks, and what they look like, the first thing you should probably know is that the archives vigilantly kept by almost all banks in Switzerland are not publicly accessible—and even when they are, the last thing… Read More