Tag: sketch

Tony Fretton: Lisson Gallery 1

Tony Fretton: Lisson Gallery 1

Tony Fretton

84-7-1 is a singular image, a drawing of Lisson 1 seen from Lisson Street. It shows the back gallery as it was first intended – but which is not what it became, because the client kept buying land and adding to it. This sketch explores how a piece of architecture… Read More

Notes on the Sketchbook

Notes on the Sketchbook

Mark Dorrian

When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence

Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten: Swiss Ambassador’s Residence

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

There is an uncanny gap between the cold precision of a computer drawing and the confusing uncertainty of the design process. We try to bridge that gap with a collaborative method that includes a lot of discussions and the use of computer-prints, scalpel, glue, pencil and Tipp-Ex.  The drawing above… Read More

Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals

Dom Hans Van Der Laan Saint Benedictusberg Abbey at Vaals

The following text is excerpted from an interview with Hans Van der Laan and Antoine Bodar, broadcast by Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), 24 December 1988. Given that we have reduced architecture to proportions – to a matter of measurements, which is akin to solving a mathematical problem, the design has not been created visually. This… Read More

Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami

Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan, 1994 The 500-metre-long, gently sloping body of the new pier lifts itself up over the water. It glows from the inside like the body of a transparent fish with all its internal organs visible. A model was made with clear perspex and… Read More

Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures

Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures

Manuel Orazi

‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More

Sir William Chambers: Somerset House

Sir William Chambers: Somerset House

Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More

Gilles-Marie Oppenord

Gilles-Marie Oppenord

David Pullins

For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More

The Sacred Games of Art

The Sacred Games of Art

Patrick Lynch

These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More

Assemble: Collective Authorship

Assemble: Collective Authorship

Giles Smith and Adam Willis

Assemble’s practice was established in 2010 through a collective desire to build together, and our first projects were largely designed on site as we went. Our practice has been and remains organised cooperatively, without hierarchy, and our design methodologies have been developed to accommodate that particular dynamic. We use large-scale… Read More

The Clandeboye Drawings

The Clandeboye Drawings

Peter Wilson

The seven Clandeboye drawings, each 35 × 35 cm and on A2 trace, were produced in 1984. The year is significant. Then the AA was busy maintaining a posture of indifference to Jenksian postmodernism, while the possibly visionary (at least in the case of architectural speculation) and certainly introspective 1970s… Read More

Drawing from a Deep Well

Drawing from a Deep Well

Patrick Lynch

I make several different types of drawings in my life as an architect and as a teacher: those made at the speed of thought in B4 sketchbooks, on my lap or at the dining table or on trains or buses; tracing drawings made on bits torn from rolls of detail… Read More

Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu

Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu

Jan De Vylder

One cannot see these drawings without seeing the mural by Sol LeWitt, in which an electrician has subsequently installed doorbells and a light switch. The mural is in the entrance hall of a city palace that was for a time the entrance to a gallery. When the gallery stopped its… Read More

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

Concrete Beach

Concrete Beach

Stephanie Macdonald

This drawing was made with a chinagraph pen over the course of a holiday afternoon. It started out roughly, as a quick sketch, but time stretched out as more people filled the page. I like using chinagraph as it can be sensitive to great softness and also very dark lines. I like its texture – it is a very… Read More

E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling

E. S. Prior’s Architectural Modelling

David Valinsky

The very fact that The Builder should publish an article explaining the benefits, the uses and the methods of making architectural models indicates just how novel the concept was in 1895, even in theory. ‘Architecture Modelling’ was the result of the almost unprecedented display of an actual model at the Royal Academy… Read More

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí

There is evidence that Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic study for a building facade is part of a real project, but we don’t know what that might be. The sketch resists interpretation and association, far different from anything else Dalí produced at the time: 1939 – a year in which he has… 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

A Space / Two Spaces

A Space / Two Spaces

Anthony Vidler

The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate:      Reading     Writing     Sleeping … 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

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

Basile Baudez

Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr Architects: The Maquette

Roz Barr

The act of making a physical artefact involves a to-and-fro engagement with an idea, in which decisions are ‘made’ and re-thought, and then un-made before the idea is realised. This roundabout but essential process of adaption is carried out, in the work of my architectural practice, through the use of… 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