Tag: sketch
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11 July 2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11 July 2023
What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape
29 June 2023
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape29 June 2023
– Stan Allen and Marina Correia
‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More
Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream
21 June 2023
Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream21 June 2023
– António Choupina and Álvaro Siza
In this short video, António Choupina and Álvaro Siza discuss a sketch for an imaginary skyscraper from Caderno 32 (1979), now in the Drawing Matter Collection. Siza describes his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High Illinois’ or ‘Sky City’ tower (1957), and his work for Rogério de Azevedo on the… Read More
Casa Ugalde Sketch
19 June 2023
Casa Ugalde Sketch19 June 2023
– Laura Bonell and Daniel Lopez-Doriga
As José Antonio Coderch told it, Mr. Ugalde climbed on the hill, sat in the shadow of a carob tree and looked around him. He then hired Coderch and his partner Manuel Valls with the unique proposal of building a house in the outskirts of Barcelona that could preserve the… Read More
Sverre Fehn and the Territorial Eye
18 May 2023
Sverre Fehn and the Territorial Eye18 May 2023
This text is adapted from an abstract to Erika Brandl’s short paper which she presented last year at the ‘Nordic Nature: Art, Ecology, Landscape’ conference in Bergen. Architectural histories of Norway have been inexorably tied to landscape and localism, framed as the romantic wedlock of nature and the built form.… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31 March 2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31 March 2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect
27 March 2023
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect27 March 2023
The fact that Álvaro Siza did not write about his work or about architecture is a conscious gesture, which goes beyond the mere neutrality of city walls. What is important in Siza is not the end result or the work, hence his lack of comment. His manner, his alibis, his… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
3 February 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work3 February 2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients
26 October 2022
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients26 October 2022
In October 1925 Le Corbusier wrote to his client Madame Meyer a remarkable letter about his proposal with Pierre Jeanneret for her villa. It combined drawings with a highly scripted text that carefully guided her through each space, from the entrance to the roof garden. Like the pioneers of early… Read More
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing
21 October 2022
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing21 October 2022
– Federica Goffi and Devon Moar
The bee drawing(s) by Devon Moar illustrate that changes in scale imply a passage of time. One drawing here becomes many drawings, each marking a different moment of discovery unfolding a process. One could say that when it comes to architectural media, there are two types of scales dealing with… Read More
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture
23 September 2022
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture23 September 2022
– Editors
These three sketches are from a sketchbook that Robert Maxwell used while studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1944. They are reproduced here to mark the publication of Robert Maxwell: the Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture, edited by Celia Scott, which is now available through Drawing… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24 June 2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24 June 2022
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook
22 June 2022
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook22 June 2022
This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… Read More
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England
18 May 2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18 May 2022
During the upheavals of the Civil War, Westminster Abbey had functioned as the church of the state for the Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of Charles II, the Abbey resumed its historic role as the coronation church for English monarchs. [1] Parliament voted towards restoring the fabric, reinstituting its monarchical function… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29 April 2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29 April 2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing
22 April 2022
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing22 April 2022
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [1] I knew very little about the eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam prior to June 2014. When challenged to respond to his drawings of the Long Gallery at Syon House, my impulse was to visit and draw my way through… Read More
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19 April 2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19 April 2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
What’s a Bludder Sketch?
28 February 2022
What’s a Bludder Sketch?28 February 2022
As a timid foreigner in the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, shuffling through hundreds of important-looking drawings, I stumbled across a funny little sketch in whose lines I found some humanity. It was made by Bengt Lindroos in 1981 and is an imagined view of his office with the… Read More
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21 February 2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21 February 2022
– Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn
10 February 2022
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn10 February 2022
Extracted, with permission, from Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing edited by Michael Merrill, published by Lars Müller Publishers © 2021. Click here to read a review of this book by Stan Allen. An auspicious meeting: At the end of 1955, a thirty-five-year-old academic named Colin Rowe visited the office… Read More
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi
19 January 2022
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi19 January 2022
Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More
On Authority
26 May 2023
On Authority26 May 2023
– Nuno Melo Sousa
Following our recent series with fala we decided to approach some other practices who have themselves developed their design process through particular drawing ‘types’, challenging our expectation of the usage and forms traditionally associated with drawing in an architecture studio. We are very grateful to fala for introducing us to Nuno Melo Sousa… Read More
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