Tag: theoretical & imaginary
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
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House
25.07.2021
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House25.07.2021
I find myself lost in the woods, then reorientated, guided by the centralised chimney. Standing dead centre in front of the gate lodge, my gaze is lifted to the space between chimney and sky, between foreground or background. A cloud of white smoke disguises itself as an English cloud, passing… Read More
Postcards: The Nature of Images
21.07.2021
Postcards: The Nature of Images21.07.2021
Our vision is simultaneously determined by the (past) historical structure of the work and by the present structure of the gaze that examines it, in which the accumulated glimpses of history often continue to operate.– Daniel Arasse Writing a postcard is the simplest thing in the world. Among other things,… Read More
The James Clarke Remake
20.07.2021
The James Clarke Remake20.07.2021
– Oscar Binder and Nikolaus Podlaha
In 1989 the architect James Clarke was commissioned to propose a design for the new Multimedia Library of Mr. Yamamoto in Tokyo, Japan. Although never built, and only a handful of sketches were ever published in some obscure magazines of the mid 90s, the drawings were highly praised by the… Read More
36 Elevations
12.07.2021
36 Elevations12.07.2021
I began this series of drawings with something else in mind. The first picture was to be drawn freehand, but I took a wrong turn straight away by setting up a structure using a set-square around which the composition would be based. I realised that the structure was already a… Read More
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City
12.05.2021
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City12.05.2021
Hans Hollein’s city structures look awry to someone familiar with his retail work. In the time that these drawings were made, Hollein completed his UC Berkeley degree, travelled across the USA, and did an exhibition with Walter Pichler in Austria. His most influential visit was to the Native American pueblos.… Read More
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing
26.04.2021
Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing26.04.2021
How we look at architectural drawings is an inherently complicated topic. The issue arises from what we understand to appear and disappear on the page. The field of architecture has spent little time talking about what we see (and don’t see) on the surface of the drawing itself. One could… Read More
Peter Märkli: My Facade Material
21.04.2021
Peter Märkli: My Facade Material21.04.2021
– Editors
The following quotations are from ‘Mein Stoff für Fassaden (My Facade Material)’, a lecture delivered online by Peter Märkli to open a series of five talks for the Architecture Foundation. The quotations are presented here in a loose fashion, some treated as aphorisms about design, others illustrated with drawings from… Read More
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound
08.04.2021
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound08.04.2021
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she… Read More
Excerpt: Shadow Places
15.03.2021
Excerpt: Shadow Places15.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Simon Unwin’s book on shadow, in his series Analysing Architecture Notebooks, available here. For 20% off until May 31st 2021, use code KHL20. The piece is illustrated with drawings specially selected by Simon from the Drawing Matter collection. ‘Yea, though I walk through the… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11.03.2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique
04.03.2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique04.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise
01.03.2021
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise01.03.2021
Melting reality, ancient history and fantasy into one, the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi hold an unparalleled allure that continues to entrance and captivate. They offer an escape into imagined and unknown worlds; each drawing an organism of its own, containing an immense depth of spatial layering and an extraordinary… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17.02.2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17.02.2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
Signature
15.02.2021
Signature15.02.2021
It’s just a small loose sheet of paper ripped off a notepad. Along its margins, an elegant round-cornered brown border, once enclosing an anonymous blank space of empty expectancy, now ceremoniously frames a mysteriously attractive, harmonious, yet utterly cryptic mark, struck and left upon its surface: a signature. By whose… Read More
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows
03.02.2021
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows03.02.2021
The pale white touch The most exquisite glow and depth of shadows An immutable mystery in the crossbeam of tranquillity simply vanished when the sunlight flooded the atmosphere Of this small corner Where we as children would feel an inexpressible chill While waiting so quiet and pliant to the touch… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse
22.01.2021
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse22.01.2021
In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… 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
art practice theoretical & imaginary urban form