Tag: plan
La Casa Della Falsita
5 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita5 February 2020
The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer
2 January 2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer2 January 2020
Towards the end of my architectural studies in the late 1960s I moved into a little house near the Prinsenhof neighbourhood of Ghent. My neighbours were Ghent people, and my landlord owned the whole block. Every month he would collect rent, and although he didn’t talk to most people, he… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24 December 2019
A Dose of Dosio24 December 2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche
13 November 2019
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche13 November 2019
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
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
Behind the Lines 13
10 October 2019
Behind the Lines 1310 October 2019
I selected a distant meadow in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself…. No sooner was the house completed than I knew it was not far enough away from everything I wished to leave behind…Later I sold the house and grounds for… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10 October 2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10 October 2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23 September 2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23 September 2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21 September 2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21 September 2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… Read More
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan
19 August 2019
Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan19 August 2019
This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More
Learning from the tortoise
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types
26 June 2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types26 June 2019
Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More
Halsey Ricardo
22 June 2019
Halsey Ricardo22 June 2019
Early in 1916, RIBA president Halsey Ricardo reported on an acquisition that, when added to the works of Bibiena, Palladio, Jones and Wren, would begin to build a more continuous corpus of the drawn history of architecture. [1] This was a large set of sketchbooks and project drawings ‘from a… Read More
Behind the Lines 10
19 June 2019
Behind the Lines 1019 June 2019
It was undoubtedly the doing of that ancient buffer Lutyens, Samuel Hardy reflected sourly, as he stared at the pages of the September 1932 issue of The Builder and saw an illustration of the winning entry. It showed Mr Edward H Banks of ‘Villa Desiré’, Downlands Road, Purley, Surrey’s awful concoction of… Read More
Ugliness and Judgment
19 April 2019
Ugliness and Judgment19 April 2019
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
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3
21 January 2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 321 January 2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2
21 January 2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 221 January 2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More
TEd’A Arquitectes
15 November 2018
TEd’A Arquitectes15 November 2018
– Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez
‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More
Bruce Goff
20 October 2018
Bruce Goff20 October 2018
This is an unbuilt house and studio project for two artists in the dry country of west Texas. It comes from a happy moment when architects could see no equation between the unreasonable and the unbuildable. Bruce Goff christened it APARTURE, perhaps a play on the words ‘apartness’, for its… Read More
Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics
7 September 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India
7 September 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India7 September 2018
Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More
Netherfield Scroll Two
28 August 2018
Netherfield Scroll Two28 August 2018
What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More
Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll
28 August 2018
Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll28 August 2018
On 7 April 2018, former members of the Grunt Group – Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones – presented their Netherfield Scroll to Drawing Matter. The 20-foot-long drawing was created c. 1971 for a low-density, social housing estate in Milton Keynes. The following video is a brief… Read More
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13 January 2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13 January 2020
– Stephen Bayley
Raymond Loewy’s contribution to NASA was not rocket science. It was one small sketch for mankind. But, like everything the designer ever did, the real significance of these fascinating sketches was outrageously bigged-up by their author. In his blindingly flashy oeuvre, their status is comparable to his (infamous) work for Coca-Cola.… Read More
plan presentation transport DMC