Tag: projection (axonometric isometric)

Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’

Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’

Sophia Banou

In 1972 Adolfo Natalini spent a few months in the United States. The main event of his visit was the seminal exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York MoMA (May 26 – September 11, 1972). Nevertheless, Natalini spent these months not only working on perhaps the most existential project of… Read More

Dissecting

Dissecting

Andrew Clancy

Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More

San Rocco

San Rocco

Helen Thomas

This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Basile Baudez

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

Ferdinando Galli Bibiena

John Cooper

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

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Conen Sigl Architekten: Drawing in retrospect

Maria Conen

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

Mario Sironi

Mario Sironi

David Vanderburgh

Politics as a Pretext for Making Mario Sironi compromised and traumatised in equal parts by his association with Italian Fascism, was known primarily as a painter and propagandist. He worked with and can be compared to Giuseppe Terragni, Mussolini’s most faithful architect, in his devotion to art as an ideological… Read More

A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother

A House for A Sculptor / A House for my Mother

Celia Scott

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

Eisenman: House II

Eisenman: House II

Stefano Corbo

Drawing is a way of thinking. I can’t think or write ideas on a computer. I write and if you look at my desk, it’s full of paper. So to me drawing is a form of writing, and a form of reading what I write. I don’t see any difference.… Read More

Narrative Architecture

Narrative Architecture

Nigel Coates

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

Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc

Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc

Martin Bressani

This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More

Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women

Witherford Watson Mann: Waiting Women

William Mann

‘What’s it like?’: the experience of being there in a building is fundamental. That’s why we draw a lot in perspective (mostly eyeballed rather than constructed), because it offers the closest approximation to being there. But… moving through an urban environment formed by many buildings, reading signs, interpreting other people’s… Read More

Projected Sections

Projected Sections

Laurent Stalder

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

Brunswick Centre

Brunswick Centre

Peter Myers

It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More

The Destruction of the City of Homs

The Destruction of the City of Homs

Deanna Petherbridge

A photograph of the bombed-out shell of Dresden, destroyed in February 1945 when I was six years old, has lived potently in my life-long memory bank. This, like other black and white photographs of the time, depicted a ghastly desolation in which empty-windowed facades tapering sharply from jaggedly pointed upper… Read More

A Public Convenience

A Public Convenience

Peter Wilson

Whoops… that sounds like the confessions of George Michael. There was in choosing this title in 1976 a certain provocation intended, a toying with misdemeanour, not those of the carnal variety, more a voluptus ocularum. This was a time when drawing could be radical, provocative, set conventions on their heads. What conventions… Read More

Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective

Mies: The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective

Desley Luscombe

What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More

Some Thoughts on Sheds

Some Thoughts on Sheds

Nicholas Olsberg

In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More

Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project

Casswell Bank Architects: The Shed Project

Alex Bank and Sam Casswell

The Garden Rooms academy drawing by Casswell Bank Architect’s is a depiction of the relationship between the new shed, the Maltings buildings and its gardens located at the western edge of Bruton. The drawing extends beyond the adjacent road connecting the town with the countryside and the river Brue that… Read More

Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park

Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park

Nicholas Olsberg

In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More

Cedric Price: Bathat

Cedric Price: Bathat

Helen Mallinson

Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Peter Eisenman

The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More

To Read A Drawing (1983)

To Read A Drawing (1983)

Peter Eisenman

What is it to read a drawing? Traditionally, we read writing and see drawing. But if we transgress that custom, then we accrue to drawing the privilege of the autonomy of the reader. If we limited ourselves to seeing drawings as drawings then there would be no possibility of unhooking… Read More