Tag: Soane and Modernism
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27
13.02.2025
Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-2713.02.2025
In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More
Eisenman on Rossi
12.02.2025
Eisenman on Rossi12.02.2025
Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping… Read More
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank
11.02.2025
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank11.02.2025
Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto
10.02.2025
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 10.02.2025
– Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman
This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More
Lisson 1 + 2
07.02.2025
Lisson 1 + 207.02.2025
LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter
03.02.2025
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter03.02.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture
06.05.2024
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture06.05.2024
What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31.01.2024
Careful Crudeness31.01.2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality
24.02.2023
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality24.02.2023
Alison and Peter Smithson often introduced figures that were protagonists in the news, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, French actor Gérard Philipe, and the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru into their architectural drawings for social housing projects—as in the case of their collages for the… Read More
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh
07.06.2021
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh07.06.2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’
18.03.2021
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’18.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life. Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More
Soane: Energy and Frustration
24.06.2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24.06.2020
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
12.06.2020
Ove Arup: Engineering the World12.06.2020
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
Wright & Lautner: The Divorce
12.05.2020
Wright & Lautner: The Divorce12.05.2020
Wright’s Eaglefeather (1941) – hilltop Malibu extravaganza for the filmmaker Arch Oboler – was running into trouble. Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, oversaw construction drawings and supervision, but Lloyd was fired by Oboler in March 1941. Wright came to Los Angeles and arranged for Lautner to complete the project… Read More
Tales from the Crypt
18.10.2019
Tales from the Crypt18.10.2019
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House
26.04.2018
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House26.04.2018
Somebody said the story about the orange is not right, but it is: he sent one of us over to the shop to buy an orange and he peeled it and took up the segments. Mogens Prip-Buus on Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House
Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis
14.02.2025
Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis14.02.2025
– Laura Harty
‘He pulls down, he builds up, he exchanges square for round.‘Horace—Epistles. I. 1. 100[1] The Aldo van Eyck drawing currently on show at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields appears, at first glance, to do precisely this. A preliminary drawing, one made for the design of the architect’s own house, on transparent… Read More
plan domestic DMC Soane and Modernism sketch