Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Bruce Goff
20 October 2018
Bruce Goff20 October 2018
This is an unbuilt house and studio project for two artists in the dry country of west Texas. It comes from a happy moment when architects could see no equation between the unreasonable and the unbuildable. Bruce Goff christened it APARTURE, perhaps a play on the words ‘apartness’, for its… Read More
Drawing Architecture
9 October 2018
Drawing Architecture9 October 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 Strange Architects
2 October 2018
Hugh Strange Architects2 October 2018
We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More
Sans Humour?
14 September 2018
Sans Humour?14 September 2018
It seems that architects are too self-conscious – or perhaps in need of being seen as permanently on duty – to portray themselves or what they do with much humour, let alone self-critical caricature. Edwin Lutyens is an honourable exception, even if his self-mockery ultimately becomes a public performance – a… 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
Conjunction and Incongruity
1 September 2018
Conjunction and Incongruity1 September 2018
The word archive, meaning both the collection of documents and the building that houses them, is doubled in its meaning and it is not necessarily clear which one precedes the other. Drawing Matter Open Day highlighted in interesting ways the relation of causality between building and drawing as document or… Read More
Behind the Lines 6
13 August 2018
Behind the Lines 613 August 2018
Richard Bentley cracked open the red seal, smiling as he always did at the peculiar crest of a man in a ridiculous long-tasselled hat, and folded out the letter. His mood was anxious; he scratched his head nervously with one hand and knocked over the ink on his drawing table with… Read More
Richard J. Neutra
10 August 2018
Richard J. Neutra10 August 2018
‘Richard J. Neutra has carried on the Wagner tradition of experimentation in new forms, materials and methods of construction… an impetus to the intelligent solution of new problems.’ Ernestine M. Fantl on the Corona Avenue School, ‘Modern Architecture in California’ (Typescript Mimeograph, MoMA Archives, 1935) Just before 6 o’clock on… Read More
The façade is the window to the soul of architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018
1 August 2018
The façade is the window to the soul of architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 20181 August 2018
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse
20 July 2018
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse20 July 2018
arq & Drawing Matter To launch the collaboration with Drawing Matter, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, the first issue of Volume 22 opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in an intense one-day session.… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16 July 2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16 July 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
Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan
13 July 2018
Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan13 July 2018
Volume 22, Issue 1 pp. 8–40 This issue of arq introduces the new collaboration with Drawing Matter. To launch the collaboration, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, this issue opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in… Read More
Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction
10 July 2018
Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction10 July 2018
The blue and pink cabin suffers from a few structural/constructional inadequacies. The first of these to be noticed is the door which binds within in its ‘frame’ (there is no frame as such; the short strap hinges simply hang off the boarding). The vertical boards which make the door have… Read More
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz
20 June 2018
Freestanding: Sigurd Lewerentz20 June 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 June 2018
Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion12 June 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
Talking to Drawings
8 June 2018
Talking to Drawings8 June 2018
Talking to Drawings was produced to accomapny the exhibition Disappear Here (RIBA, 2 May – 7 Oct 2018), which explored the history, application and implications of perspective, how it spans truth and illusion, linking the disciplines of art, architecture and mathematics, through material from the RIBA and Drawing Matter collections.… Read More
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus
23 May 2018
Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus23 May 2018
This is a Drawing Room, a with-drawing room. It is simply a love-declaration to the architectural drawing. Four walls, three large doorways. One end calmer, the other more open. The first thing decided is a table-bench; the drawing flat on the tabletop – like when you draw it – and… Read More
Behind the Lines 5
10 May 2018
Behind the Lines 510 May 2018
Boughton MonchelseaMaidstone September 26, 1828 My lord, Please be so good as to find designs for the lodge that you commissioned, a habitation for your woodman, John Platt. I earnestly hope that it will be the ornament that you desired for your park improvements. I also enclose the books that… Read More
Empathy
8 May 2018
Empathy8 May 2018
Being that can be understood is language. – Hans-Georg Gadamer One of the items in the Drawing Matter collection is a notebook once owned by Álvaro Siza. In it is this sketch, made of the Royal Academy London, where he was asked to consider making some work for an exhibition.… Read More
Behind the Lines 4
28 March 2018
Behind the Lines 428 March 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
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980
23 October 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023 October 2018
On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea – what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… Read More
elevation exhibition presentation projection (axonometric isometric) sketch