Writer: Helen Thomas
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto
10.02.2025
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 10.02.2025
– Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman
This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More
Glarner Wirtschaftsarchiv
08.01.2024
Glarner Wirtschaftsarchiv08.01.2024
Through an unprepossessing door tucked into the corner of two buildings located at the edge of a precinct both rural and industrial is the entrance to the kind of magic world that archives often hide. Founded 20 years ago by Dr. Sybill Kindlimann of the influential local family, Blumer, the… Read More
Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review
20.03.2023
Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review20.03.2023
This provocative book raises many questions about books themselves, including through the way in which it is published. As the first in a gta Verlag series that works the grain of open access by presenting a combined digital and analogue publication simultaneously, it is an interesting choice. The printed book,… Read More
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt
11.01.2022
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt11.01.2022
‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More
Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review
25.10.2021
Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review25.10.2021
What is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.– Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957 This seemingly simple book is a thought-provoking collection of things. There is a lot of room for implication… Read More
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt
14.06.2021
Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt14.06.2021
Review The compelling question of reality, or rather its representation as realism presented as an aesthetic category, acts as the organising principle of this interesting book. This is an investigation of the relationship between photography, architecture and the problem of realism, as its subtitle explains. Its author, Jesús Vassallo, immediately… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts
30.03.2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts30.03.2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer
07.04.2020
Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer07.04.2020
In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More
Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere
09.10.2018
Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere09.10.2018
Frail and delicate, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s drawing of a geodesic sphere floats, without context, in the space of the paper it inhabits. More than the form it reveals, the net of thin, red lines expresses the presence of the space within it. A perspective effect emanates from the central point… 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.
The Facade is the Window to the Soul of Architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018
01.08.2018
The Facade is the Window to the Soul of Architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 201801.08.2018
– Adam Caruso and Helen Thomas
In response to the Biennale’s theme of Freespace, Caruso St John Architects put together an exhibition that celebrates the historical richness and social generosity of the façade. Whether a building is public or private, whatever its intended use, its façades have the responsibility to make a positive contribution to the public… Read More
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz
20.06.2018
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz20.06.2018
Inhabiting and transforming the lozenge-like space of a long room in the heart of the Central Pavilion’s labyrinth, an installation by Petra Gipp creates a series of veiled rooms, corners and framed views, making spaces both ordered and complex. Everything is luminous. Light drops drops down from the skylights opened… Read More
Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion
12.06.2018
Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion12.06.2018
Flooded with light cast across alluringly animated walls, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice is lined with drawings gathered together under the name of Architectural Ethnography. Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow Wow has been developing the thinking underlying this method of observing and recording the human environment since the… Read More
San Rocco
20.06.2017
San Rocco20.06.2017
This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More
Aitchison / Prendergast
30.12.2016
Aitchison / Prendergast30.12.2016
This finely detailed watercolour drawing is a perfect miniature representation by George Aitchison of his proposal for the composition of a wall in the morning room of Lord Leconfield’s house in Chesterfield Gardens, London, 1881. The figures that define the room – the door and its frame, the fireplace and… Read More
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
09.11.2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee09.11.2016
Zuidzande When they are confronted with the beginnings of a project, architects start the complex mining of their imaginations from different approaches, each one entirely personal. Their way of being and thinking, encapsulated in how they absorb and sort a million things at once, is not necessarily expressed in the… Read More
Michael Graves
07.08.2016
Michael Graves07.08.2016
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
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
Building as Drawing: The Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm
07.07.2023
Building as Drawing: The Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm07.07.2023
– Helen Thomas
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here.… Read More
agriculture symposium april 2023 (series)