Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25 March 2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25 March 2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
Behind the Walls
23 March 2020
Behind the Walls23 March 2020
Albert, an artist known only by his first name, thinks about buildings in ways similar to an architect. As he draws, he imagines the structures on the page having a future life in bricks and mortar, considering as he does so whether the audience for his drawings will ask themselves,… Read More
Summerson: The Little House
4 March 2020
Summerson: The Little House4 March 2020
– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.
Sky Architecture
2 March 2020
Sky Architecture2 March 2020
On this day in 1933, a certain gorilla scaled the Empire State Building. King Kong might have had an easier time if he had taken the lift. This design for the elevator shaft, by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, is held in the Drawing Matter collection. Here are are more examples… Read More
Seeing, and Disbelieving
2 March 2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving2 March 2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
Behind the Lines 14
3 February 2020
Behind the Lines 143 February 2020
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
Battersea
22 January 2020
Battersea22 January 2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), 90.
Origins in Translation
20 January 2020
Origins in Translation20 January 2020
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
A Chevrolet Truck
20 January 2020
A Chevrolet Truck20 January 2020
It was the architect Philip Johnson who first compared cars to statuary. In the ‘Eight Automobiles’ show he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, he coined the expression ‘rolling sculpture’. Johnson was good at coinages: two decades before he had given us ‘the International Style’ to describe… Read More
Watkin on Milizia: Frontispiece to The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern
17 January 2020
Watkin on Milizia: Frontispiece to The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern17 January 2020
The illustration on the title page to the Vite is striking and can be seen as a preparation for that of Pugin’s Contrasts (Sailsbury 1836). Milizia depicts a crowded scene in which, on the left hand side, a Corinthian portico and Laugier’s primitive hut, fashioned from trees and branches, represent Antiquity and Nature. Pallas,… Read More
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13 January 2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13 January 2020
Raymond Loewy’s contribution to NASA was not rocket science. It was one small sketch for mankind. But, like everything the designer ever did, the real significance of these fascinating sketches was outrageously bigged-up by their author. In his blindingly flashy oeuvre, their status is comparable to his (infamous) work for Coca-Cola.… Read More
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture
26 December 2019
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture26 December 2019
One of the best-known drawings related to the discipline is the ‘allegory of architecture’, drawn by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen and engraved by Jean-Jacques Aliamet. [1] The original is now in the collection of Drawing Matter. Aliamet’s engraving serves as the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, and was included… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24 December 2019
A Dose of Dosio24 December 2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
Surface-oriented
18 December 2019
Surface-oriented18 December 2019
My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. —Italo Calvino The here in question is a narrow room occupying the top floor of a three-storey house on the southern fringe of Montparnasse. Heavily laden bookshelves and strategically placed objets extend along the… Read More
Aldo & Adolf
13 December 2019
Aldo & Adolf13 December 2019
And architecture itself? Architecture is still the central theme of Loos’s thought, and among his essays is a piece on the competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, a piece, which, like the one on the Michaelerhaus and ‘Ornament and Crime,’ is essential to the understanding of the meaning of architecture. This… Read More
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’
27 November 2019
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’27 November 2019
I. In a melancholy mood, the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia sat down at his drawing table in the little bed-sit he was renting in Geneva and took up his pencil and a little hardbound notebook to write down his ‘notes personelles / 1905’: ‘At my age, that of forty-three, I… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
7 November 2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson7 November 2019
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space. French architect Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine made this cut-out paper model of an interior in or before 1804, the year in which his famous client, Napoleon, became emperor. It represents a simply… Read More
What Lies Beneath
31 October 2019
What Lies Beneath31 October 2019
‘The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be,’ recalled Mark Twain in his 1897 Following the Equator. The travelogue was the result of an 1895 lecture tour that Twain, by then 60, had made of the British Empire… Read More
Tales from the crypt
18 October 2019
Tales from the crypt18 October 2019
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
Behind the Lines 13
10 October 2019
Behind the Lines 1310 October 2019
I selected a distant meadow in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself…. No sooner was the house completed than I knew it was not far enough away from everything I wished to leave behind…Later I sold the house and grounds for… Read More
Retail Therapy
30 March 2020
Retail Therapy30 March 2020
– A. Trystan Edwards
In architectural design the size of the human unit must always be borne in mind. It is nowhere more necessary to observe this maxim than in the determination of the scale of shop fronts, for here not only is the tendency to an undue magnification of parts most strongly encouraged… Read More
commerce elevation presentation