Tag: theoretical & imaginary

Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers

Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers

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Repton does a Bernini – A Crescent for The Ham

Repton does a Bernini – A Crescent for The Ham

Timothy Mowl

Ever since 1743, when John Wood failed to get backers for his vast Royal Forum, the area to the south of South Parade has been treated like the campus of a nondescript university. The chequered gardens of Abbey Orchard have been supplanted by Manvers Street car park, while to the… Read More

Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities

Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities

Janos Gat

Judit Reigl was ninety-two years old in 2015 when she started Dance of Death, her transcendent series of small-scale vanitas drawings. Having reached a stage where she could barely see her own pencil marks, Reigl found skulls to be a ready subject. She said she had drawn many skulls in… Read More

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

Paul Goesch was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital and, in 1940, murdered by the Nazis. Looking at these intense, yet often playful and exuberant drawings, it is impossible to forget the stark facts of his life. Which is unfortunate, because an exclusive attention to his personal history imposes a… Read More

Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture

Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture

C.M. Howell

The defining characteristics of modern architecture took shape against a host of disorientating shifts in the 19th century. On the theoretical side, the instantiation and development of aesthetics as an autonomous realm strained a sacred harmony between beauty, truth, and goodness. On the practical side, technological, social, and cultural advancements… Read More

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Janine Barrier

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard’s drawing, while illustrating one of the poems of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reveals a true picture of the progress of architecture. The transformation of Philemon’s and Baucis’ humble cottage, as required by Jupiter, which unfurls before our very eyes, proclaims that in 1769, the metamorphosis of the primitive hut at… Read More

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown

The following text is an excerpt from Denise Scott Brown’s 2018 Soane Medal lecture, written by Thomas Weaver, and developed out of a series of conversations between Denise Scott Brown and Thomas Weaver in July 2018. I have never thought of myself as a photographer, only an architect and urbanist,… Read More

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

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

Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

‘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

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Sylvia Lavin

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

Drawing as Preservation

Lisa Huang

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’

Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’

Iain Boyd Whyte

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

Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée

Beatrice Lampariello

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

Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection

Marianna Charitonidou

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)

Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)

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

Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review

Markus Lähteenmäki

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

The City of Design

The City of Design

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

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

Mark Dorrian

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

Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto

Jaime Tillería Durango

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

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II

Freddie Phillipson

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

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I

Freddie Phillipson

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

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction

Freddie Phillipson

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

The Evolving Role of Drawing

Nicholas Olsberg

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

The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence

Peter Sealy

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