Tag: plan
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami
19.01.2018
Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami19.01.2018
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont
07.01.2018
Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont07.01.2018
– Editors
This large and exquisite drawing by Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont represents a garden design in the form of the plan of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza by Bernini. Serried ranks of trees rather than stone walls and columns are used to marshal a vast landscape into a perfect emblem of… Read More
The Politics of the Image
05.01.2018
The Politics of the Image05.01.2018
– Maria S. Giudici, Joseph Mercer, Florian Scheucher, Keranie Theodosiou, Livia Wang, Sophie Williams and Feifei Zhou
My course, The Politics of the Image at the Royal College of Art, drew on the Drawing Matter Collection amongst others to explore the construction of images since the Renaissance. This construction has allowed a crafty lie to evolve, be challenged and ultimately influence reality – albeit not always in straightforward ways.… Read More
Parataxis
28.12.2017
Parataxis28.12.2017
‘Whatever elements that may come to hand or that are selected from the profusion of materials within reach, are combined with words to create a simple poetic image. This should amuse, disturb, mystify or provoke reflection. These images above all should entertain – the only sure road to appreciation.’ Man… Read More
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House
23.12.2017
Sir William Chambers: Somerset House23.12.2017
Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More
Gilles-Marie Oppenord
15.12.2017
Gilles-Marie Oppenord15.12.2017
For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More
William Butterfield
06.12.2017
William Butterfield06.12.2017
Nothing Permitted But What Has Been Foreseen William Butterfield eschewed the illustrative perspective, preferring instead to develop even his studies as contract drawings that would serve three tasks: as presentations through which a project could be comprehended, as instructions from which his contractors and clients could not swerve, and as… Read More
Alvar Aalto’s city
01.11.2017
Alvar Aalto’s city01.11.2017
For whatever reason it is produced, a blueprint solidifies a moment in the design process and further solidifies the project. It is not necessarily the final moment, and often after the blueprints have been produced they might be annotated by one or the other master, resulting in new drawings from… Read More
All Change on Change Alley
05.10.2017
All Change on Change Alley05.10.2017
At one o’clock in the morning of 25 March 1748, a fire broke out in Exchange Alley in the heart of the City of London. It started in the powder room of a barber and wig maker and by the time it was extinguished, eighty houses had been destroyed and… Read More
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa
22.07.2017
Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa22.07.2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
Permanence
18.04.2017
Permanence18.04.2017
Drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural hand-drawing must… Read More
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect
09.04.2017
Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect09.04.2017
A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s
21.03.2017
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s21.03.2017
Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known for their innovative graphic design and spectacular photomontages which… Read More
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook
02.03.2017
James Gowan: Inside the Sketchbook02.03.2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland
23.02.2017
George Wilkinson: Building On The Stones Of Ireland23.02.2017
George Wilkinson (1813/4–1890) was an English architect employed by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1839 to facilitate the construction of workhouses throughout Ireland in response to growing numbers of homeless poor. While historians have written of the Poor Laws and the workhouses, Wilkinson’s contribution to both merits further study in… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22.02.2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22.02.2017
On occasion, an architectural drawing can serve as the surviving witness of a moving and complex historical event. Here, on a mutilated sheet of paper drawn in the middle of eighteenth century in the office of the most important architect of his day, we have the only record of a building on the… Read More
Projected Sections
15.01.2017
Projected Sections15.01.2017
The perspectival and axonometric section: Great Britain, around 1950-1970 As a technique of representation and a design tool, the perspectival or axonometric section acquired a central role in the field of residential architecture during the post war period in Great Britain. Various protagonists, for example Denys Lasdun (Cluster Block), Alison… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23.11.2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23.11.2016
Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
09.11.2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee09.11.2016
Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
08.10.2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition08.10.2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Fontaine: Market Stalls
01.08.2016
Fontaine: Market Stalls01.08.2016
The following text is an excerpt from a conference paper given by Basile Baudez as part of the Rencontres du Centre André Chastel, Paris, May 2016. The ‘History of Colour in Architectural Drawing, 16th–19th Centuries’ is part of a forthcoming book. Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing… Read More
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney
29.01.2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29.01.2016
Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More
A Blueprint is… Blue
24.01.2018
A Blueprint is… Blue24.01.2018
– Neil Bingham
A common error in looking at architectural drawings is to mistake mechanical reproductions for originals. Original and copy drawings both physically consist of two elements: the material (like ink) and the support (usually paper). But – and it may seem obvious to say – lines on paper are made by… Read More
interior plan DMC section elevation projection (axonometric isometric) presentation publication housing