Tag: theoretical & imaginary
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor
01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor01.08.2016
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means,… Read More
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15.07.2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15.07.2016
Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More
The Imperial Palace of God
09.05.2016
The Imperial Palace of God09.05.2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
The Continuous Monument
05.02.2016
The Continuous Monument05.02.2016
My sketchbooks show a really typical project called the Continuous Monument. The Monument was a demonstration of the falsity and the absurdity of some of the theories that went on in that period. We started producing images of this sort of continuous monument, the continuous strip of urbanisation which was… Read More
Believe in books (1998)
13.11.2015
Believe in books (1998)13.11.2015
I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. -John Hejduk Quoted from Such Places as Memory, 1998
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City
06.11.2015
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City06.11.2015
Archizoom describe this ‘hypothetical theatre’ as part of a fluid and unstoppable culture, a non-stop metropolis re-imagined to fit the times, characterised by mobile theatres, unbound books, rooms without plan, unwritten music, … and cities made of voids. For the first time the presentation technique has … become a specific… Read More
Dismantled Sketchbook
02.11.2015
Dismantled Sketchbook02.11.2015
To some extent this is the battleground of the British architectural avant-garde; the incompatibilities of graphics and architecture, the freedom that the former allows and the restrictions that the latter asserts. In recent years, the graphics have got smoother whilst the dialectic has remained largely unresolved. A conclusive project is… Read More
James Gowan: The Expandable House
01.11.2015
James Gowan: The Expandable House01.11.2015
James Gowan and James Stirling, first as partners (1956–1963) and then in their own practices, reworked the ideas of composition both in plan and section, often echoing alternative Modernist sources, such as those of the Soviet avant-garde. They looked for new ways to forge connections between programme and form, and… Read More
A Brutal Matter (1962)
16.10.2015
A Brutal Matter (1962)16.10.2015
Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.
Isolation or Participation?
11.09.2015
Isolation or Participation?11.09.2015
Isolation or participation? The immersions were allusions to two contrary attitudes ever present in the deportment of so many in this era: a readiness to join the currents of social change or a determination to isolate oneself, waiting for what might be next.
Preamble to a New World (1963)
04.09.2015
Preamble to a New World (1963)04.09.2015
– Constant
Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.
New Babylon (1963)
03.09.2015
New Babylon (1963)03.09.2015
– Constant
The following is excerpted from Constant’s New Bablyon, 1963, and translated by Kenny Stevens. Books full of words, oral, printed traditions fixed the cities as a law of life for generations – conquered and vanquished before and re-erected. Buried under a hollowed time, or still an endless and compelling space,… Read More
A Life of Their Own (1985)
28.08.2015
A Life of Their Own (1985)28.08.2015
The following has been excerpted from Staying Creative; Artistic Passion is a Lifelong Pursuit – and These Mature Masters Prove the Point. (Otto Luening, Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Rudolph), December 1985. I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It… Read More
History & Origins
21.08.2015
History & Origins21.08.2015
And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part III
03.06.2013
Future Scenarios, Part III03.06.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
As much as is needed: Employing the lightest means Few came closer to actually realising the grandest of grand designs imagined than Edwin Lutyens, called upon to realise something close to George Elliot’s Imperial Palace of God in New Delhi, or to avoiding its absorption and demise in the ensuing… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part I
30.05.2013
Future Scenarios, Part I30.05.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Capturing the rainbow: the city of tomorrow On any given day late in the 1930s, so someone has calculated, more than 30,000 Americans either bought a train ticket or ordered lunch looking at one of the murals of the designer Winold Reiss. With each new commission, and as the burdens… Read More
Simplification
06.05.2011
Simplification06.05.2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22.07.2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22.07.2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
publication theoretical & imaginary DMC