Tag: presentation

Aldo & Adolf

Aldo & Adolf

Aldo Rossi

And architecture itself? Architecture is still the central theme of Loos’s thought, and among his essays is a piece on the competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, a piece, which, like the one on the Michaelerhaus and ‘Ornament and Crime,’ is essential to the understanding of the meaning of architecture. This… Read More

Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche

Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche

Richard Hollis

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

Ernest Gimson: Against Hotch-Potch

Ernest Gimson: Against Hotch-Potch

Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted and Barley Roscoe

When Ernest Gimson applied to join the Art Workers’ Guild in 1891 he described himself as a ‘decorator’, and it is clear that interior decoration and furnishing remained vital to him throughout his life as part of his vocation as an architect. His were not the fully coordinated decorative schemes… Read More

Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek

Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek

Iris Moon

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

John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero

John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero

Stan Allen

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

Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard

Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard

Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More

Behind the Lines 10

Behind the Lines 10

Philippa Lewis

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

On Cornices, Part I

On Cornices, Part I

Emma Letizia Jones

In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More

Boompjes II

Boompjes II

Stefano de Martino

Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… Read More

Boompjes I

Boompjes I

Stefano de Martino

In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More

Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island

Zoe Zenghelis

The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More

Schinkel

Schinkel

Kurt Forster

Schinkel’s architecture is of a piece with his life, yet in various ways, by picturing and publishing the work, he took himself out of it. He wanted to make sure that his architecture could stand on its own, however deeply it had been a part of him. He was, in… Read More

Behind the Lines 9

Behind the Lines 9

Philippa Lewis

Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through the… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More

Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution

Iris Moon

In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More

Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Eszter Steierhoffer

‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More

Behind the Lines 8

Behind the Lines 8

Philippa Lewis

Annette Berthe Schlegel, wife of Adalbert, mother of Mariana, Friedrich, Werner and Elmira, and grandmother to little Wilhelm and Lydia, died peacefully in her cherry wood bed at home in Marienstrasse, Stuttgart, on March 29th, 1812. Adalbert, a successful watchmaker, had held Annette dear, and two weeks after the funeral… Read More

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid

Desley Luscombe

When, in January 1983, Peter Cook reviewed a recently held exhibition for Zaha Hadid’s 59 Eaton Place, he spoke of the resonance between the individual and their education in developing an architectural identity. [1] He pondered on the development of Hadid over that period,     What if fate had led her… Read More

Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935

Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935

John David Rhodes

Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More

Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett

Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett

Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo

The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More

Madelon Vriesendorp

Madelon Vriesendorp

Niall Hobhouse and Madelon Vriesdendorp

Excerpted from Madelon Vreisendop in conversation with Niall Hobhouse, RIBA, 2 July 2018

Behind the Lines 7

Behind the Lines 7

Philippa Lewis

Mr. Tassie’s House On June 27th 1807 William Tassie scratched his long nose, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and finished off his letter to Alexander Wilson Esq of Messrs. Dunlop & Wilson, Booksellers of Glasgow:   ‘I have been near a twelve month engaged with alterations in my house –… Read More

Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980

Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980

Editors

On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea — what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… Read More

Bruce Goff

Bruce Goff

Nicholas Olsberg

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