Tag: sketch

Protected: John Hejduk’s Farm Library

Protected: John Hejduk’s Farm Library

Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

Alison Bartlett

The ladder, a seemingly unexceptional instrument within the array of futuristic and utopian architectural schemes, sits front and centre; the protagonist of not only this drawing but of Constant’s almost two-decade-long project, spanning 1956–1974, entitled ‘New Babylon’. Propped somewhat haphazardly against a series of horizontally-connected and vertically-angled planes, it exudes… Read More

OMA: London—Foreplay

OMA: London—Foreplay

Richard Hall

This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More

Protected: Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Protected: Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Mark Dorrian

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Gareth Griffiths

On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.

Felicia Liang and William Wikström

Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Tim Richardson

In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

Ahmed Belkhodja

Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More

Alberto Ponis, The London Years

Alberto Ponis, The London Years

Gillian Darley

I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More

DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura

DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura

Philip Steadman

Antonio Canaletto used a camera obscura to make careful sketches of the buildings of Venice. The Gallerie dell’ Accademia has a quaderno, a notebook containing 140 pages of these sketches, which provided the raw material for paintings made in the 1730s, as well as finished drawings that Canaletto offered for sale.… Read More