Tag: urban form
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett
11.11.2018
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett11.11.2018
– Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo
The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More
Hugh Ferriss
04.10.2018
Hugh Ferriss04.10.2018
In 1916 a series of laws came into force in the city of New York called the Zoning Ordinance, the first of its kind in America, which regulated building use, area and height of new buildings.
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16.07.2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16.07.2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
Behind the Lines 4
28.03.2018
Behind the Lines 428.03.2018
Isabella Puddefoot settled herself on the sofa, picked up her embroidery, and after enquiring about his day at the bank, remarked to her husband Samuel: ‘I do declare I am quite spent; running up and down stairs all day is very trying to my constitution. It is eight flights from dealing… Read More
WilkinsonEyre
28.03.2018
WilkinsonEyre28.03.2018
This drawing presents a snapshot of the BIM model from the northern end of Battersea Power Station. Combined with a point cloud survey of the existing fabric, it overlays newer elements of construction with layers of the historic model. Careful selection of the information presented makes it possible to see… Read More
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow
14.02.2018
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow14.02.2018
The Commons Overview These drawings were exhibited in ‘Off Location: Drawings for the US Embassy, Moscow’, an impromptu exhibition held at Pushkin House from 13–28 February 2018. In conjunction with the exhibition, curator Tim Abrahams gave a talk entitled ‘Fiction and Reality in Moscow’ at Pushkin House.
Shatwell DrawingScape
29.01.2018
Shatwell DrawingScape29.01.2018
This year a group of 12 students from the Intermediate School at the Architectural Association, London, are developing proposals for the Shatwell site. They take inspiration from the Drawing Matter collection to create exhibition spaces to display and celebrate the culture of drawing. The work ranges from speculative interpretations of… Read More
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures
11.01.2018
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures11.01.2018
‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More
The Sacred Games of Art
01.12.2017
The Sacred Games of Art01.12.2017
These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More
Peter Smithson: Obelisk
12.10.2017
Peter Smithson: Obelisk12.10.2017
Peter Smithson’s influence predates slightly that of Cedric Price. It has also migrated to Shatwell, most notably in the recent re-erection of his wooden obelisk that first stood at Hadspen, commanding the view across the countryside. At Shatwell the obelisk takes on a more urban role (the design was originally… Read More
The Drawing as Actor
05.09.2017
The Drawing as Actor05.09.2017
In two publications about post-war reconstruction, How should we rebuild London? (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1945) and Die Stalinallee Nationales Aufbauprogramme (Verlag Der Nation Berlin, 1952), the planning ferment in London and Berlin becomes a performance in itself, revealed through the choice of the media and subjects which they each adopt for illustration.… Read More
USSR in Construction No. 9 1931
01.09.2017
USSR in Construction No. 9 193101.09.2017
Constructing a Fantasy of the New Moscow through Architectural Photographs In June 1931 Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a speech to the Moscow plenum entitled, Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiyu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (On the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and other Socialist Cities of the USSR). The… Read More
Dissecting
25.07.2017
Dissecting25.07.2017
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School. The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
Guy Debord
07.06.2017
Guy Debord07.06.2017
‘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
Loggia Mercato Nuovo, Florence
27.02.2017
Loggia Mercato Nuovo, Florence27.02.2017
A few blocks north of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence one finds the loggia of Mercato Nuovo (1546–51), a rectangular edifice three bays wide and four bays deep, built under Cosimo I de’ Medici. It was constructed as part of a program meant to bolster the trade of gold and silk… Read More
Paolo Soleri
22.02.2017
Paolo Soleri22.02.2017
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
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
08.10.2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition08.10.2016
A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France 1765-1837 was curated by Nicholas Olsberg and Basile Baudez, and organised by Drawing Matter Trust in collaboration with The Courtauld Gallery as part of Somerset House’s celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. The exhibition considered the place of architecture… Read More
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room
04.10.2016
Fontaine: Model for a Music Room04.10.2016
A fresh alternative to the intellectual and formal mannerisms associated with architectural drawings in the West since the age of Leon Battista Alberti, Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine’s drawing explores a simple, direct way of communicating a spatial proposition. To access his vision we don’t need to be familiar with the conventions of… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… 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
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space
04.03.2016
Hans Hollein: Infinite Space04.03.2016
Between 1959 and 1964, the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler (1936–2012) and the architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014), working in dialogue, introduced a radically adventurous new plasticity to form, questioning the functional idea of architecture as shelter and its symbolic role as monument, as well as calling for the architect to… Read More
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935
20.11.2018
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 193520.11.2018
– John David Rhodes
Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More
presentation urban form public space DMC