Tag: Extracts: Where to Begin?

Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa

Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa

Juhani Pallasmaa

This is the first in a series revisiting responses from architects to the question: Where to Begin?. The question was posed by the Drawing Matter editors while compiling the first volume in our Extracts series – find more information here. Beginning to sketch a project has always been easier for me… Read More

Bramante: Five Dots

Bramante: Five Dots

Guido Beltramini

The remote past is distant and faded. Original objects and documents that might be used to study it are scarce. They are often uncooperative and most of the time they don’t tell the truth, because they have been reframed by history’s ‘victors’ over the centuries. We must always bear in… Read More

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Stan Allen and José Oubrerie

‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More

OMA in Scheveningen

OMA in Scheveningen

Willem Jan Neutelings

Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More

Soane: Energy and Frustration

Soane: Energy and Frustration

Ptolemy Dean

This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More

Ove Arup: Engineering the World

Ove Arup: Engineering the World

Hugh Pearman

My introduction to the work of Ove Arup, the great Anglo-Danish structural engineer whose firm made both the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris buildable, came over the course of three years as I walked, almost every day, across his Kingsgate foot-bridge in Durham. This is the… Read More

Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer

Paul Robbrecht: Drawn Closer

Paul Robbrecht

Initiatief 86 was important because (as Robbrecht en Daem) it was more or less our first real work for art. It was also an important moment for the Belgian art scene. That summer Jan Hoet curated Chambres d’Amis, exhibiting the work of 50 artists in homes across Ghent. At the… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Michael Wolfson

This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More

Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings

Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings

Els Claessens and Tania Vandenbussche (ectv) were Van Hee’s first assistants, and later went on to work with Robbrecht en Daem. In an ‘Observation’ in the book Autonomous Architecture in Flanders p. 198 they remember the ways that Van Hee and Robbrecht would begin to design through drawing: “José … placed a… Read More

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Peter Märkli: Thinking Drawings

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

These are an intriguing set of drawings … they are very memorable and have a charm and magic about them. They have a directness, a sense of humour and ease, they make you smile. At first glance they look as if they were done by someone who is untrained, they… Read More