Tag: topographic/cartographic
Cedric Price: FIR Project
12 October 2017
Cedric Price: FIR Project12 October 2017
Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More
Concrete Beach
13 August 2017
Concrete Beach13 August 2017
This drawing was made with a chinagraph pen over the course of a holiday afternoon. It started out roughly, as a quick sketch, but time stretched out as more people filled the page. I like using chinagraph as it can be sensitive to great softness and also very dark lines. I like its texture – it is a very… Read More
Guy Debord
7 June 2017
Guy Debord7 June 2017
‘But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the hands of the engraver … not to swell the work … but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents,… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
1 March 2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project1 March 2017
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
Paolo Soleri
22 February 2017
Paolo Soleri22 February 2017
Over an advertisement for a series of workshops in the Arizona desert in 1979 ran the legend: ‘Soleri is in the desert not to escape the city for some pastoral dream but to create a wholly new urban civilization.’ It is not known when he started referring to himself in… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc
17 February 2017
Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc17 February 2017
This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More
Heathrow Airport Project
25 January 2017
Heathrow Airport Project25 January 2017
These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… Read More
Michael Graves
7 August 2016
Michael Graves7 August 2016
When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More
Ducros: Arch of Titus
1 May 2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus1 May 2016
This drawing by the Swiss artist Abraham-Louis-Alphonse Ducros — a preliminary sketch with a deep perspectival view of the Arch of Titus in Rome, and inspired by Panini’s Arch of Titus, 1745 — is the basis for one of his standard images, a definitive view of Rome sold to eighteenth-century… Read More
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture
4 March 2016
Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture4 March 2016
The following has been excerpted from ‘Everything is Architecture’, Bau Magazine, 1968. Limited and traditional definitions of architecture and its means have lost their validity. Today the environment as a whole is the goal of our activities—and all the media of its determination: TV or artificial climate, transportation or clothing, telecommunication… Read More
The Continuous Monument
5 February 2016
The Continuous Monument5 February 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
Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)
15 January 2016
Becoming One with the Landscape (1969)15 January 2016
The following is excerpted from Two Continuous Monuments, by Nicholas Olsberg. Published in the AA Files No. 71, 2015. The architect’s guiding idea has been to create a building which would ‘literally tend to disappear – becoming one with the landscape’ … The dramatic architectural concept and primarily coniferous flora… Read More
A Brutal Matter (1962)
16 October 2015
A Brutal Matter (1962)16 October 2015
Architecture … is a brutal matter … it crushes those who cannot stand it. – Walter Pichler. Quoted from a manuscript statement, c. 1962.
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle
1 October 2015
Jean-Baptiste Lassus’s Sainte-Chapelle1 October 2015
The watercolour of the Sainte-Chapelle drawn by Lassus dates from the first years of the restoration, when the desire to restore the monument to its original thirteenth-century form was still very strong. The chapel is shown without its fifteenth-century flamboyant rose window and its exterior staircase built by Louis XII,… Read More
Isolation or participation?
11 September 2015
Isolation or participation?11 September 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.
New Babylon (1963)
3 September 2015
New Babylon (1963)3 September 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
The changing metropolis 1900–1930s
26 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1900–1930s26 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part II: Unifying the city landscape: 1900–1930s The area of Finsbury in north London became a borough in 1900 and proposals rapidly appeared to replace the terraces of George Dance the Younger’s Finsbury Square and Finsbury Circus with a large volume of continuous office blocks. John Belcher’s proposal seems to… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part III
3 June 2013
Future Scenarios, Part III3 June 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
Architectural anxiety
28 September 2011
Architectural anxiety28 September 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More
Landscape situations
21 January 2011
Landscape situations21 January 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More
All Change on Change Alley
5 October 2017
All Change on Change Alley5 October 2017
– Celina Fox
At one o’clock in the morning of 25 March 1748, a fire broke out in Exchange Alley in the heart of the City of London. It started in the powder room of a barber and wig maker and by the time it was extinguished, eighty houses had been destroyed and… Read More
plan topographic/cartographic publication public space