Tag: presentation

Isolation or Participation?

Isolation or Participation?

Ugo La Pietra

Isolation or participation? The immersions were allusions to two contrary attitudes ever present in the deportment of so many in this era: a readiness to join the currents of social change or a determination to isolate oneself, waiting for what might be next. 

Preamble to a New World (1963)

Preamble to a New World (1963)

Constant

Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.

A Life of Their Own (1985)

A Life of Their Own (1985)

Paul Rudolph

The following has been excerpted from Staying Creative; Artistic Passion is a Lifelong Pursuit – and These Mature Masters Prove the Point. (Otto Luening, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Rudolph), December 1985. I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It… Read More

John Lautner: House and Studio for Edgar Ewing

John Lautner: House and Studio for Edgar Ewing

Nicholas Olsberg

On presenting himself as a potential apprentice at Taliesin to Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., Lautner heard no objection except the sly comment that he would be ‘too big for the rooms’. Everything about his approach to visualising a design speaks to the distance from which this towering figure saw the… Read More

History & Origins

History & Origins

Aldo Rossi

And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More

The Hatred of Rendering (1930)

The Hatred of Rendering (1930)

Le Corbusier

The following has been extracted from a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1930. I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is… Read More

Five Boxes

Five Boxes

Michael Craig-Martin

Line drawing — drawing without shading, cross-hatching or chiaroscuro — permits and conveys the most precise sense of accuracy of any kind of drawing. The facts are laid bare, nothing can be fudged or obscured. Leonardo used line drawing for his studies of everything from flying machines to the human… Read More

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

François Soufflot le Romain: Ruins

Editors

This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More

The Changing Metropolis 1815–1900

The Changing Metropolis 1815–1900

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More

Future Scenarios, Part III

Future Scenarios, Part III

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More

Architectural Anxiety

Architectural Anxiety

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More

Landscape Situations

Landscape Situations

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More