Tag: presentation
Blind Spots
20 October 2017
Blind Spots20 October 2017
Architectural drawing is a strange and powerful tool. It is simultaneously a means of depiction and a way of constructing the world. That’s why, beyond the conventions of practice, the politics of the architectural image remain so significant. The drawing is the world we construct: its own ideas of subject, its modes… Read More
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot
5 October 2017
James Wines: Ghost Parking Lot5 October 2017
This drawing depicts a site-specific public art project, commissioned by the retail developer David Burmant, which entombed twenty junked cars under a layer of asphalt in a suburban shopping plaza. James Wines was interested in upending expectations about common iconographic elements of suburbia by inverting the relationship between such objects… Read More
Aldo Rossi
30 September 2017
Aldo Rossi30 September 2017
In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More
Drawings in Conversation
1 September 2017
Drawings in Conversation1 September 2017
C. R. Cockerell, Joseph Gwilt and the Royal Exchange Competition Owing to a faulty gas lamp, on the 10th January 1838 the Royal Exchange in the City of London was destroyed by fire. The loss of the building was seen to be potentially catastrophic for trade in the City and… Read More
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling
2 August 2017
E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling2 August 2017
The very fact that The Builder should publish an article explaining the benefits, the uses and the methods of making architectural models indicates just how novel the concept was in 1895, even in theory. ‘Architecture Modelling’ was the result of the almost unprecedented display of an actual model at the Royal Academy… Read More
A souvenir and survey
22 June 2017
A souvenir and survey22 June 2017
While working on the the Paris basilica of Sainte Genevieve, Jacques-Germain Soufflot sent his nephew – also trained as an architect – to Italy, in order to compile some research on domes. Soufflot was struggling at this time with the design of Sainte Genevieve’s main dome, inspired partly by St… Read More
Karl Friedrich Schinkel
7 June 2017
Karl Friedrich Schinkel7 June 2017
In his designs for the Tilebein House, Schinkel makes considerable use of different colours corresponding to the nature of the materials depicted. To indicate iron he uses a darkish blue, for wood mostly yellow and, of course, when he wants to show cut masonry (he is building in brick), he… Read More
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena
19 May 2017
Ferdinando Galli Bibiena19 May 2017
When, in the two-point perspective drawings of Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the viewer’s line of sight ricocheted off the centre and shot in opposite directions off stage, a new prospect of social and architectural order was proposed. For the century preceding the work of the brothers – Antonio, Giuseppe, and Ferdinando… Read More
Two ideas of the House
9 May 2017
Two ideas of the House9 May 2017
This is probably my first collage with such a serious intent. It came about while I was working with Robin Evans at the Architectural Association. I made it during the second term of our collaboration running Unit 4 in the Diploma School. We had set out to determine a possible… Read More
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s
21 March 2017
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s21 March 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
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother
17 March 2017
A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother17 March 2017
In this drawing of his project for a house for a sculptor, Ugo La Pietra tries to criticise the boxiness of the standard house and the context of the city. Working to synthesise the forms and disciplines of art and architecture, he draws an enveloping free-form volume on pillars. This… Read More
Narrative Architecture
10 March 2017
Narrative Architecture10 March 2017
Executed after it opened, this drawing captures the intended vibrancy of one of my first built projects, a café tacked onto the front of a department store in downtown Shibuya. The architectural bricolage of the built space translated well into the mixed media technique of splurged acrylic paint, caked-on oil… Read More
Jørn Utzon
3 March 2017
Jørn Utzon3 March 2017
I had been working from late 1956 to 1957 with Vilhelm Wohlert on the schemes of Louisiana and the summerhouse for Niels Bohr, and suddenly there was no more work. Wohlert, who knew all my weaknesses (he had been my teacher in my fifth year at school) advised me to… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
1 March 2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project1 March 2017
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
Ange-Jacques Gabriel
22 February 2017
Ange-Jacques Gabriel22 February 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
Superstudio: Cinematography
30 January 2017
Superstudio: Cinematography30 January 2017
It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More
Heathrow Airport Project
25 January 2017
Heathrow Airport Project25 January 2017
These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… Read More
Pier Leone Ghezzi
20 January 2017
Pier Leone Ghezzi20 January 2017
This drawing by the Roman artist Ghezzi depicts an unusual funerary monument, commissioned by the Sacchetti family for their beloved donkey called ‘Grillo’ (Cricket). According to the extensive inscription, this clever and loyal animal regularly carried baskets all alone from central Rome to the Sacchetti’s Villa Pigneto, ten kilometres away.… Read More
Gordon Matta-Clark
19 January 2017
Gordon Matta-Clark19 January 2017
The Genesis of Architecture (and the Genetics of an Anarchitect) During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single… Read More
Behind the Lines 1
22 September 2017
Behind the Lines 122 September 2017
– Philippa Lewis
I look at this drawing and imagine the following scenario: Rex Savidge, architect, is running short of time. He must submit his plan for a commercial development in Newcastle the following day. Giving it a last look over, he is generally pleased with it: he has taken particular care with the… Read More
interior behind the lines (series) creative writing Extracts: Women Writing Architecture projection (axonometric isometric) DMC presentation commerce public space