Tag: plan

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.M. Howell

In view here is a startling watercolour by Charles Stanley Peach, titled Plan of a Church Constructed on Divine Principles (1910)—his pictorial articulation of the cruciform layout of the Christian Cathedral. Architectural aspects are overlayed upon two images of Jesus. The first with his arms splayed wide, hands pinned to… Read More

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Despite predictions of the… 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

DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture

DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture

Fabio Colonnese

The grid and the squared paper have played an important role in architectural practice, both in analysing and measuring what already exists (sites, monuments, etc.) and in organising and modularising the graphic development of the design process. The use of the square grid is generally linked to Greek civilization, mathematics,… Read More

Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review

Giuliano Fiorenzoli: Because of Seeing Architecture (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

In 1977, two years into the city’s fiscal crisis, I moved to New York City—a young architecture student, ready to take in everything the metropolis had to offer. What I found was a city scarred by garbage strikes, the blackout, and a serial killer calling himself the Son of Sam.… Read More

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

Ahmed Belkhodja

Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More

Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’

Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’

Anja Segmüller

The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was one of the most frivolous and lavish events in late-19th-century European history. Erected along the Champs-de-Mars, it encompassed a huge, covered arena surrounded by dozens of pavilions and gardens.[1] It was conceived by Napoleon III to showcase of industrial and technological progress, to promote… Read More

Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building

Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building

Konogan Beaufay

This polychrome mosaic, discovered in 1872 in Rome near Termini train station, is the only mosaic depiction of a plan of a bath building known from the Roman period. Only three fragments were recovered, representing less than five percent of the original mosaic whose dimensions approximated 3.40 x 5.70 m. Two… Read More

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Andrew Carr

Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More

Capilla Pajaritos

Capilla Pajaritos

Alberto Cruz

The following text was written by Alberto Cruz as an account of the project for a small chapel outside of Santiago (1952–3; first published in Spanish in 1954). It describes an unfolding process of design, framed around the guiding principles of observation, act, and, form—the key tenets of Cruz’s architectural… Read More

Quinta da Malagueira

Quinta da Malagueira

Pier Vittorio Aureli

In this short text Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on Quinta da Malagueira housing project in what he sees as a potential convergence between formal principals and political intentions. Quinta da Malagueira is perhaps the last great ‘social housing project’. That is, it is the last great architectural contribution to the… Read More