Tag: projection (axonometric isometric)

Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould

Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould

Charles Holland

The cover of early editions of John Summerson’s book The Classical Language of Architecture features a curious drawing of a Doric entablature. To all intents and purposes the profile of the entablature is correct, but it has been extruded through the method of oblique projection. It is as if we… Read More

Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 1

Drawing Parallels: John Hejduk’s Wall House 1

Ray Lucas

The following text is extracted, with permission, from Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric and Oblique Drawings by Ray Lucas, published by Routledge © 2020. Available here. Drawing Parallels explores the uses of parallel projection in the work of five twentieth century architects: James Stirling, JJP Oud, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk,… Read More

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

Sebastiano Brandolini

Alberto Ponis was born in Genoa in 1933. He took his architecture degree in Florence in 1960. His father, Mario Alberto, had founded the M.I.T.A. (Manifattura Italiana Tappeti Artistici) in 1926 in Nervi, near Genoa. The company’s building was built by Luigi Daneri in 1940. Gio Ponti, Arnaldo Pomodoro and… Read More

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis

The site chosen by Juan S., an Argentinian with a penchant for Italy, was almost alarmingly steep and sheer above the sea. Even the path leading to it was perilous, and trodden with bated breath. During our long conversations about where the house would be built, we were not so… Read More

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Ciaran Scannell

The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Richard Hall

Hans van der Heijden is an Amsterdam-based architect. He co-founded biq in 1994 with Rick Wessels before establishing his own office, Hans van der Heijden Architect, in 2014. During this timeframe he has developed a recognisable and idiosyncratic drawing repertoire, the origins of which can be traced back to his… Read More

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids

Rebecca Siefert

The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample

This is the seventh in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

Nicholas Logsdail

A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More

Architecture at the Edge

Architecture at the Edge

Craig Moller and Marco Moro

The following is a conversation between Marco Moro and Craig Moller, New Zealand-born architect and author of the drawing pictured above. Moller made the drawing while in a design studio taught by Mark Wigley in 1985, while the latter was about to finish his doctoral thesis within the newly established… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Emilie Banville

In the beginning, there was only a shell. An empty shell. But we could already sense the contours of its elliptical shape, its multilayered protective envelope, stratified, laminated, like the bark of a tree (a). Slowly, the outer flaps of the carapace would move away from each other, vertically sweeping… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Fabrizio Gallanti and Mauricio Pezo

This is the fourth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von… Read More

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Stan Allen

One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Stan Allen and José Oubrerie

‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More

Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views

Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views

John Tuomey

Rear Views I joined the Stirling office in September 1976, working late hours through the length of four years until my return to Dublin towards the end of 1980. Straight out of college and into my first proper job, the critical years in my formation as an architect. I had… Read More

Eisenman: House VI (1985)

Eisenman: House VI (1985)

Kathleen Enz Finken

The design of House VI was partly the result of Eisenman’s attempt to reconcile linguistic theories with architectural design. His interest in the work of Noam Chomsky, especially his theories of syntax, led to the investigation of possible analogies between language and architecture, and particularly the syntactic aspects of architectural… Read More

Six Architects on their Dream Desks

Six Architects on their Dream Desks

Roz Barr, Biba Dow, Elizabeth Hatz, Emma Letizia Jones, Stephanie Macdonald and Helen Thomas

Drawing Matter recently acquired this design for a table, below. Although the work’s last sale in 1972 attributed the drawing to Thomas Chippendale, we are (perhaps wishfully) hoping that it might be an architect’s own design for desk. The sheet set off a flurry of chatter about the platonic spaces… Read More

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

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

Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan

Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan

Caroline Voet

This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More

Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types

Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types

Caitlin Murray

Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Stan Allen

I arrived in Rafael Moneo’s Madrid office in early 1984. I had graduated from Cooper Union two years earlier and spent 18 months working for Richard Meier in New York.  I met Moneo in 1978 when he was teaching at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but I don’t… 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