Tag: sketch
The Birth of the Column
07.04.2016
The Birth of the Column07.04.2016
The following text is excepted from an interview with Kate Goodwin, in: Sensing Spaces, Architecture Reimagined, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014. All drawings are by Álvaro Siza, 2013–2014, for the design, placement and installation of three columns in precast yellow concrete, first in the courtyard of Burlington House and then in… Read More
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space04.03.2016
Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More
To Read A Drawing (1983)
12.02.2016
To Read A Drawing (1983)12.02.2016
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
The Continuous Monument
05.02.2016
The Continuous Monument05.02.2016
My sketchbooks show a really typical project called the Continuous Monument. The Monument was a demonstration of the falsity and the absurdity of some of the theories that went on in that period. We started producing images of this sort of continuous monument, the continuous strip of urbanisation which was… Read More
On Drawing
04.02.2016
On Drawing04.02.2016
When I was very young I wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be a painter, and I started making paintings. Quite successfully: once, I sold a painting and bought a Fiat Cinquecento with this money. Impossible for me now, even if I complete a fairly big project. But… Read More
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole
22.01.2016
Robert Venturi: The Difficult Whole22.01.2016
Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving… Read More
Michael Webb: Sin Centre
05.12.2015
Michael Webb: Sin Centre05.12.2015
The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More
View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)
04.12.2015
View the Action, Neck or Talk (1965)04.12.2015
All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.
Ville Spatiale
20.11.2015
Ville Spatiale20.11.2015
The ‘spatial city’, or rather its infrastructure, is the support for a great number of heterogeneous messages. The spatial city, in a way, is the ‘blank sheet of paper’ on which a work is drawn. And it is precisely this nature of the blank sheet of paper that allows nearly… Read More
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings
15.11.2015
Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings15.11.2015
– Florian Beigel and Philip Christou
These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More
The Lost Art of Drawing
04.11.2015
The Lost Art of Drawing04.11.2015
The following has been excerpted from Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing, New York Times, 2012. I personally like to draw on translucent … tracing paper, which allows me to layer one drawing on top of another, building on what I’ve drawn before, and again, creating a personal, emotional connection… Read More
Dismantled Sketchbook
02.11.2015
Dismantled Sketchbook02.11.2015
To some extent this is the battleground of the British architectural avant-garde; the incompatibilities of graphics and architecture, the freedom that the former allows and the restrictions that the latter asserts. In recent years, the graphics have got smoother whilst the dialectic has remained largely unresolved. A conclusive project is… Read More
James Gowan: The Expandable House
01.11.2015
James Gowan: The Expandable House01.11.2015
James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More
Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System
23.10.2015
Zünd-Up: ‘Psycho-dynamic’ Street and Park System23.10.2015
An element in this Viennese collective’s proposal to extend the city into a newly ‘psycho-dynamic’ street and park system, this ‘Cortina-Bob-Bahn’ would have ornamented the gardens of the Prater with a drive-yourself roller-coaster tower some 1500 metres high.
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives
13.10.2015
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives13.10.2015
‘Architecture,’ said Walter Pichler, ‘is a brutal matter … It crushes those who cannot stand it.’ Between 1961 and 1963 the sculptor and designer, working in collaboration with the architect Hans Hollein and drawing on conversations with Raimund Abraham and Friedrich Achleitner, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to architecture,… Read More
Haus-Rücker-Co.
09.10.2015
Haus-Rücker-Co.09.10.2015
This art collective – we might call them the ‘house thief company’ or ‘house drawing company’– took its name from a pun on the verb ‘to draw’ and an old slang word for ‘thief’. Their projects during this period involved interventions in which a house or building would be ‘stolen’… Read More
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents
02.10.2015
Buckminster Fuller: Six Patents02.10.2015
1-170-604: Zelthaut für ein kugelkalottenförmiges Zeltgestell 1-097-653: Bauwerk in Kugel- oder Kugelabschnittform 1-292-354: Räumliches Gitterwerk für Gewölbe, Kuppeln 926-229: Geodesic Dome 1-294-387: Dôme à construction triangulée 1-009-850: Geodesic Structures
Preamble to a New World (1963)
04.09.2015
Preamble to a New World (1963)04.09.2015
– Constant
Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.
New Babylon (1963)
03.09.2015
New Babylon (1963)03.09.2015
– Constant
The following is excerpted from Constant’s New Bablyon, 1963, and translated by Kenny Stevens. Books full of words, oral, printed traditions fixed the cities as a law of life for generations – conquered and vanquished before and re-erected. Buried under a hollowed time, or still an endless and compelling space,… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father
14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund: The Father14.08.2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Wagnerschule
01.06.2015
Wagnerschule01.06.2015
The drawings of Emil Hoppe (1876 – 1957) and Otto Schönthal (1878–1961) attracted particular interest in the Land Marks exhibition, and people were eager for us to share them more widely. They are presented here with little comment and a few additions for context. These drawings by Emil Hoppe, Otto Schönthal and… Read More
Potomania (1982)
08.01.2015
Potomania (1982)08.01.2015
Call it ‘Potomania’ — plants and flowers above all … a column of water cascading freely on to a little pond … the column a staff both shining and singing.
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s
29.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s29.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building
18.03.2016
Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building18.03.2016
The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More
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