Tag: sketch
Soane: Energy and Frustration
24 June 2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24 June 2020
This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More
Ove Arup: Engineering the World
12 June 2020
Ove Arup: Engineering the World12 June 2020
My introduction to the work of Ove Arup, the great Anglo-Danish structural engineer whose firm made both the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris buildable, came over the course of three years as I walked, almost every day, across his Kingsgate foot-bridge in Durham. This is the… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer
11 June 2020
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer11 June 2020
This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti
5 June 2020
A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti5 June 2020
Small sauna is part of a peculiar farm, where architecture is important. Sheltered by dense vegetation, the site is located on a steep incline on the edge of a valley grooved by water in a landscape of rolling fields, above the residential building and barnyard of an old dairy farm.… Read More
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)
1 June 2020
Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)1 June 2020
excerpted from The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985)
Working with Asplund
29 May 2020
Working with Asplund29 May 2020
Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer
28 May 2020
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer28 May 2020
– Sarah Handelman and Jaume Mayol
This drawing for a house in Mallorca joins a number of sketches we made to understand the project. Each space is made of separate elements. To understand the space you need to dive into each element, and to understand each element you need to be in the space. To draw… Read More
Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)
26 May 2020
Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)26 May 2020
Two fragments of texts paired with two fragments of process. Writing in the May 1976 issue of Architecture + Urbanism, Rossi reflects on two projects: the Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan and the Fagnano Olona in the Lombardy region. In both of the drawings placed alongside the architect’ s writing, the forms… Read More
Calculated Aesthetics
19 May 2020
Calculated Aesthetics19 May 2020
The floor plan of the Losone gymnasium (1990–1997) by Livio Vacchini is a computer drawing made through the repetition of four basic elements: a rectangular black solid, and three types of short lines – one vertical and two diagonals in opposite directions. The black solid is copied with equal distance… Read More
On William Kent (1771)
19 May 2020
On William Kent (1771)19 May 2020
Here is Walpole’s famous one-liner, but with the remainder of his text on William Kent quoted in full; this is as Pevsner, in his unpublished Visual Planning and the Picturesque, apparently intended it to be. He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the… Read More
Hotel Sphinx (1978)
18 May 2020
Hotel Sphinx (1978)18 May 2020
In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these projects are… Read More
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer
12 May 2020
Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer12 May 2020
Initiatief 86 was important because (as Robbrecht en Daem) it was more or less our first real work for art. It was also an important moment for the Belgian art scene. That summer Jan Hoet curated Chambres d’Amis, exhibiting the work of 50 artists in homes across Ghent. At the… Read More
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper
30 April 2020
Louis Kahn: Notes on a Scrap of Paper30 April 2020
This scrap of paper, perhaps scooped up from the floor or a waste basket in Louis Kahn’s studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, shows a single sketch – spidery lines outlining a modest block and strange openings. Beginning drawing in 1958 Kahn searched for a design of a new building… Read More
Grounded: Plans & Planning
29 April 2020
Grounded: Plans & Planning29 April 2020
– Richard Hall and Niall Hobhouse
The following is part of an email exchange between Niall Hobhouse and Richard Hall in response to Richard’s text on James Gowan and John Hejduk, One Thing Leads to Another. Niall Hobhouse: When you have time, I thought it would be interesting to encourage you to think about why it is… Read More
Plan with the form of a growling dog
29 April 2020
Plan with the form of a growling dog29 April 2020
I was drawing, endlessly it seemed, a hotel for a competition in Switzerland – fruitlessly as it turned out. I cheered myself along by seeing in the plan the face of an animal, a friendly bear, or more likely a dog. James’ ‘building with the form of a howling dog,’ which he… Read More
Shape
28 April 2020
Shape28 April 2020
Shape calls attention to things and their meanings. Architects, whether they mean to or not, give shape to things, and the people who see or inhabit those things, whether in full consciousness or not, respond to these shapes. The dimensions of this response are somewhat difficult to measure, since they… Read More
Space
27 April 2020
Space27 April 2020
Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23 April 2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23 April 2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer
7 April 2020
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer7 April 2020
In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More
Where Words Fail
6 April 2020
Where Words Fail6 April 2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Drawing Culture at SOM New York
3 April 2020
Drawing Culture at SOM New York3 April 2020
When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More
Gowan on the English House
1 April 2020
Gowan on the English House1 April 2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30 March 2020
Houses of Work and Play30 March 2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza
26 June 2020
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza26 June 2020
– Bruno Silvestre
Inside the cover of Álvaro Siza’s sketchbooks, there is a whole world: the real and the imagined. In his personal registers of the real, Siza accepts the world as it is. He uses drawing in a playful but productive way, learns when he apprehends, absorbs when drawing. This process of… Read More
DMC sketch