Tag: theoretical & imaginary
Comins x Shatwell Tea House
25.08.2023
Comins x Shatwell Tea House25.08.2023
– Various
Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More
Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture
21.07.2023
Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture21.07.2023
‘Found’ in the archive at Drawing Matter, this wild text by Marinetti on his friend and collaborator Sant’Elia seems not to have been previously translated. Its occasion was a commemorative exhibition of the young architect’s work organized in 1930 by the commune of his native city, Como, fourteen years after… Read More
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11.07.2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11.07.2023
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
Drawing as Preservation
14.06.2023
Drawing as Preservation14.06.2023
Jiang Yuan’s ‘Epanggong Illustration’ is a reverie made real by the tip of Yuan’s paintbrush. It is simultaneously a fantasy of a past to which one cannot return, a fascination with a form of existence that has disappeared, and also a set of ideas, which live on in spheres far… Read More
Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’
12.05.2023
Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’12.05.2023
This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. In January 1917, the architect Bruno… Read More
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée
03.04.2023
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée03.04.2023
This text is excerpted from Aldo Rossi. Insulae, edited by Nadejda Bartels, a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, run by the Tchoban Foundation (on display from 4 February – 14 May 2023). Drawing represented for Aldo Rossi the privileged… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection
13.02.2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13.02.2023
Michael Sorkin, in Drawings for Sale, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator: ‘the drawing as artefact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture’. Sorkin argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator… Read More
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
09.02.2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)09.02.2023
– Editors
Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review
30.01.2023
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review30.01.2023
This carefully curated and beautifully displayed exhibition brings together 150 drawings with numerous publications and films to display a wave of rebellion and research by architects across the European continent, with a focus on the east, over three decades. The abundance of visionary thinking that followed the boom of post-war… Read More
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism
19.10.2022
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism19.10.2022
As my title indicates, this text will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto
09.09.2022
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto09.09.2022
Looking at This was a long time ago/now this is lost, as well as other drawings in Rossi’s unofficial collection of l’architettura assassinata, brings to mind the image of a feast. The scenes are funereal indeed, but they hold a festive aura, as if a celebration had just taken place… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II
17.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II17.06.2022
This is part two of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I
16.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I16.06.2022
This is part one of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction
08.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction08.06.2022
This text introduces The Ulysses Project by architect Freddie Phillipson, his exploration of the relationship between the buildings of Dublin and James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, from 17 June – 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
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
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence
07.04.2022
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence07.04.2022
In 1991, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron prepared a submission with the artist Remy Zaugg for the Berlin Morgen (‘Berlin Tomorrow’) exhibition organised by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. By surrounding Berlin’s Tiergarten with four new buildings, they proposed to restructure the park – then perceived as… Read More
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City
21.03.2022
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City21.03.2022
– Paul Harrison and John Wood
We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More
Entering the Imperial Palace
16.03.2022
Entering the Imperial Palace16.03.2022
‘What a subject for John Martin!’ exclaimed a passer-by, as the hungry flames flickered up York Minster. Maybe they had in mind his apocalyptic painting The Fall of Nineveh, exhibited that same year at the Western Exchange on Old Bond Street and reproduced widely as a mezzotint print. Unbeknown to… Read More
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan
01.02.2022
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan01.02.2022
Writing in Cities of Hope (1993), the historian Conrad Hamann relates that, on mentioning to Robert Venturi the name of the Australian postmodernist architect Peter Corrigan, the first words from Venturi’s mouth were ‘Oh God! Corrigan!’. Yet it must be made clear that to Corrigan, and to his wife and… Read More
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe
25.01.2022
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe25.01.2022
Gardens have always been the location to contemplate and speculate on man’s place in nature. Gardens bring the macrocosm into the microcosm by the necessity of being a living place, connecting to the wider rhythms, ecological networks, or the even more abstract forces that create our world. When Charles and… Read More
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum
04.10.2021
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum04.10.2021
There is a handwritten phrase in red ink at the bottom of this sketch, which reads in Italian: ‘for the continuous monument (genesis)’. This drawing is from one of Adolfo Natalini’s sketchbooks and depicts a series of studies about the earth. In the same sketchbook, he drew multiple sequences of… Read More
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)
16.09.2021
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)16.09.2021
The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More
The City of Design
09.01.2023
The City of Design09.01.2023
– Emilio Ambasz
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
theoretical & imaginary landscape