Category: commentaries, rants & reflections

A Space / two Spaces

A Space / two Spaces

Anthony Vidler

The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate:      Reading     Writing     Sleeping … Read More

Ferdinando Galli Bibiena

Ferdinando Galli Bibiena

John Cooper

When, in the two-point perspective drawings of Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the viewer’s line of sight ricocheted off the centre and shot in opposite directions off stage, a new prospect of social and architectural order was proposed. For the century preceding the work of the brothers – Antonio, Giuseppe, and Ferdinando… Read More

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

Basile Baudez

Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More

Fortifications

Fortifications

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Elizabeth Hatz

Elizabeth Hatz

Elizabeth Hatz

Permanence – drawing as adjuration (incantation) If architecture, like art, is a way of asking forgiveness for being mortal (consider the Egyptians or Etruscans), making something last long after the last sigh of its author and searching for a form of permanence, transcending the most ephemeral moment, then the architectural… Read More

Conen Sigl Architekten

Conen Sigl Architekten

Maria Conen

A drawing made in retrospect is the opposite of a sketch made at the beginning of the design process, which is an incomplete kind of searching for a way to order and compose the constitutive elements. This kind of ‘drawing made afterwards’ is much more about bringing all the principal… Read More

Roz Barr Architects

Roz Barr Architects

Roz Barr

The act of making a physical artefact involves a to-and-fro engagement with an idea, in which decisions are ‘made’ and re-thought, and then un-made before the idea is realised. This roundabout but essential process of adaption is carried out, in the work of my architectural practice, through the use of… Read More

GOWAN DMC (SB6)

GOWAN DMC (SB6)

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Mario Sironi

Mario Sironi

David Vanderburgh

Politics as a Pretext for Making Mario Sironi compromised and traumatised in equal parts by his association with Italian Fascism, was known primarily as a painter and propagandist. He worked with and can be compared to Giuseppe Terragni, Mussolini’s most faithful architect, in his devotion to art as an ideological… Read More

House II

House II

Stefano Corbo

Drawing is a way of thinking. I can’t think or write ideas on a computer. I write and if you look at my desk, it’s full of paper. So to me drawing is a form of writing, and a form of reading what I write. I don’t see any difference.… Read More

Galli da Bibiena

Galli da Bibiena

Fabrizio Ballabio

In 1732, renowned architect and painter Ferdinando Galli da Bibiena published a meticulously compiled document illustrating a theory of perspective for the specific use of the architect and the painter. The book was intended for the students of Bologna’s Accademia Clementina (currently the city’s Academy of Fine Arts) and had… Read More

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond

Marcelo Ferraz

‘Please, draw a hand with three fingers folded and the index finger pointing, so that we can make the signs for the toilets and exits’, Lina Bo Bardi instructed me, but I hesitated. Timid in the early days of my internship and not knowing how to draw, I was being… Read More

Ellis: James Gowan

Ellis: James Gowan

Ellis Woodman

While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More

Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project

Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project

Tim Abrahams

This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More

Paolo Soleri

Paolo Soleri

Tim Abrahams

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

VIOLLET-LE-DUC: Mont Blanc

VIOLLET-LE-DUC: Mont Blanc

Martin Bressani

Perry Kulper

Perry Kulper

Sophia Banou

‘Spatial Blooms’ and Digital Expectations Within the currently dominant visual culture, architectural drawing is persistently called to compete with a wide range of digital modes of visualisation, as well as fabrication, that tend towards simulation rather than representation. Is architectural drawing rendered redundant in this proliferation of digital renderings? And,… Read More

Dorrian: Michael Webb

Dorrian: Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian

In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More

Lähteenmäki: Superstudio

Lähteenmäki: Superstudio

Markus Lähteenmäki

It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More

Macarthur: Malton

Macarthur: Malton

John Macarthur

Trees and Clouds: the picturesque, perspective and aquatint An early architectural use of aquatint was James Malton’s 1798 book An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: Being an Attempt to Perpetuate on Principle, That Peculiar Mode of Building Which Was Originally the Work of Chance. Malton took his authority from Uvedale Price’s An Essay… Read More

Olsberg: Gordon Matta-Clark

Olsberg: Gordon Matta-Clark

Nicholas Olsberg

During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single long stroke of the pen. At the conclusion he would… Read More

Stalder: Projected Sections

Stalder: Projected Sections

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Thomas: Aitchison / Prendergast

Thomas: Aitchison / Prendergast

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