Tag: topographic/cartographic
Web of Intrigue
3 April 2020
Web of Intrigue3 April 2020
Searching the internet for the drawings of Michael Sorkin, one comes across a lengthy list of the projects that have emerged from his eponymously titled studio. Halfway down the list can be found an exotic beauty of a drawing soberly captioned thus: House of the Future. 1999. Coloured Pencil, Hand… Read More
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
5 March 2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)5 March 2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Next Year in Yemen
9 February 2020
Next Year in Yemen9 February 2020
‘Next year, there will be a civil war in Yemen. Please lend me the money so I can go now,’ I had the wit to ask my parents. It was after my first year in architecture school, not knowing that this journey would come to define me as an architect.… Read More
Imaginal Cloud Spaces
31 December 2019
Imaginal Cloud Spaces31 December 2019
Many hours can be spent on what art historian Mary Berry calls ‘the sheer act of looking’ at the Japanese folding-screen paintings titled Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto). [1] Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such paintings captured a seemingly complete image of the capital city. Through the consistent use of… Read More
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s
25 October 2019
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s25 October 2019
Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10 October 2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10 October 2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Ugliness and Judgment
19 April 2019
Ugliness and Judgment19 April 2019
In the summer of 1740, John Wood the Elder ventured his first study of the lithic monuments that surrounded his native city of Bath, drawing sketches of the stones at Stanton Drew. These earned him the patronage of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, which enabled Wood to undertake more… Read More
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974
5 April 2019
Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 19745 April 2019
This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… Read More
Behind the Lines 9
2 February 2019
Behind the Lines 92 February 2019
Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through the… Read More
Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow
23 December 2018
Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow23 December 2018
‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More
Artists at Work
14 September 2018
Artists at Work14 September 2018
I recently had the pleasure of jointly selecting a group of drawings from the Katrin Bellinger collection for the exhibition Artists at Work at the Courtauld Gallery, London (3 May to 15 July 2018). The title is generically applied to her focused collection of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs concerned with artists’… Read More
Behind the Lines 14
3 February 2020
Behind the Lines 143 February 2020
– Philippa Lewis
These are just insignificant sketches, but they remind me of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in 1937; by night it was a unique experience – mémorable. You see, one theme of the exposition was light and water: an expression of what could be achieved with the power of modern electricity,… Read More
topographic/cartographic presentation civic & municipal public space behind the lines (series) creative writing DMC