Tag: sketch

Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive

Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive

We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More

Artists at Work

Artists at Work

Deanna Petherbridge

I recently had the pleasure of jointly selecting a group of drawings from the Katrin Bellinger collection for the exhibition Artists at Work at the Courtauld Gallery, London (3 May to 15 July 2018). The title is generically applied to her focused collection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs concerned with artists’… Read More

Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics

Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics

Matt Page

i Hector Horeau’s sketch of the Church of La Madeleine came at the height of the Paris Commune – the radical socialist regime that governed the French capital from 18 March – 28 May 1871. Although dated 19 April 1871, the drawing is on the verso of a frontispiece to Panorama… Read More

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Niall Hobhouse

Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More

Yacht Club Path

Yacht Club Path

Alberto Ponis

I The drawings have different stories. They don’t have a linear story, a beginning date and then a finished date at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in the beginning before the project is built and then continue during the construction of the project and sometimes too – actually, quite often… Read More

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

Nicholas Olsberg

Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More

Three Timber Constructions

Three Timber Constructions

David Grandorge

When forested and harvested responsibly timber can be considered as a sustainable, renewable resource. With regard to its use as the material of choice in these self-build projects, it has two distinct advantages: firstly, it is fairly cheap relative to other building products. Secondly, it is a democratic material –… Read More

Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37

Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37

Neil Bingham

Drawings, personal notes and poems flow across nearly 170 little pages and three months of Alberto Campo Baeza’s life, recorded during 2010 in an architectural sketchbook that he presented to the V&A in 2015. While scripted predominantly in Spanish, much is penned in English in which Campo Baeza is fluent.… Read More

Empathy

Empathy

Andrew Clancy

Being that can be understood is language. – Hans-Georg Gadamer One of the items in the Drawing Matter collection is a notebook once owned by Álvaro Siza. In it is this sketch, made of the Royal Academy London, where he was asked to consider making some work for an exhibition.… Read More

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn

These two drawings of the Hounslow gate, however, belong to a different kind of drawing, which happens less frequently, possible only every few months. It often happens at a moment in the design process when progress is slowing, the range of issues we are exploring seems too restricted, a sense… Read More

Eurolandschaft Dérive

Eurolandschaft Dérive

Peter Wilson

The format is Japanese: a concertina sketchbook presented empty to me by Akira Suzuki shortly after the 1983 completion of our Tokyo Suzuki House design. The drawing format is also Japanese – influenced by our reading of Tokyo (documented in Western Objects + Eastern Fields, AA 1989). Tokyo is difficult for… Read More

Take Courage

Take Courage

Freddie Phillipson

Architecture is born of experience, yet its realisation depends in no small measure on belief. Most buildings owe their existence primarily to evidence – the demonstrable proofs of the benefits they provide – for intuition must always be interrogated to justify the confidence placed in the architect. But the mysterious… Read More

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