Tag: plan
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti
05.06.2020
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti05.06.2020
Small sauna is part of a peculiar farm, where architecture is important. Sheltered by dense vegetation, the site is located on a steep incline on the edge of a valley grooved by water in a landscape of rolling fields, above the residential building and barnyard of an old dairy farm.… Read More
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)
01.06.2020
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)01.06.2020
excerpted from The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985)
Working with Asplund
29.05.2020
Working with Asplund29.05.2020
Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More
Hotel Sphinx (1978)
18.05.2020
Hotel Sphinx (1978)18.05.2020
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 projects are… Read More
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures
18.05.2020
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures18.05.2020
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
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation
08.05.2020
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation08.05.2020
– Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey
John Tuomey: Let me tell you the story of this drawing. We were at one of those despairing moments when we were putting together our book Space for Architecture and feeling that we had never achieved anything of any substance. We didn’t have a lot of work going at that particular moment,… Read More
Plan with the form of a growling dog
29.04.2020
Plan with the form of a growling dog29.04.2020
I was drawing, endlessly it seemed, a hotel for a competition in Switzerland – fruitlessly as it turned out. I cheered myself along by seeing in the plan the face of an animal, a friendly bear, or more likely a dog. James’ ‘building with the form of a howling dog,’ which he… Read More
Grounded: Plans & Planning
29.04.2020
Grounded: Plans & Planning29.04.2020
– Richard Hall and Niall Hobhouse
The following is part of an email exchange between Niall Hobhouse and Richard Hall in response to Richard’s text on James Gowan and John Hejduk, One Thing Leads to Another. Niall Hobhouse: When you have time, I thought it would be interesting to encourage you to think about why it is… Read More
Space
27.04.2020
Space27.04.2020
Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More
One Thing Leads to Another
23.04.2020
One Thing Leads to Another23.04.2020
Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More
Where Words Fail
06.04.2020
Where Words Fail06.04.2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Drawing Culture at SOM New York
03.04.2020
Drawing Culture at SOM New York03.04.2020
When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More
Gowan on the English House
01.04.2020
Gowan on the English House01.04.2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30.03.2020
Houses of Work and Play30.03.2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built
20.03.2020
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built20.03.2020
There are several curiosities in the plan of this classic modernist house by Richard Neutra. First, more area is allowed for dogs than for music. Second, there is a two-car garage, but a separate parking-space for a Rolls-Royce. Here is fine discrimination. But fine discrimination is exactly what you would… Read More
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
05.03.2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)05.03.2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold
03.03.2020
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold03.03.2020
– Biba Dow
Giorgio Morandi’s work focused on studying again and again a small group of domestic objects – vases, jugs, bottles – in his home in Bologna. During his adult life, he produced a large quantity of paintings and etchings which together build up a shimmering representation of his field of focus.… Read More
Seeing, and Disbelieving
02.03.2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving02.03.2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
La Casa Della Falsita
05.02.2020
La Casa Della Falsita05.02.2020
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
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13.01.2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13.01.2020
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
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer
02.01.2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer02.01.2020
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
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)
04.05.2020
The Ultimate Climes of John Lautner (1986)04.05.2020
– Esther McCoy
Extracted, with permission, from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, published by East of Borneo Books © 2012. The publication is available at East of Borneo.
DMC plan section elevation presentation domestic