Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Gowan: a rather beautiful coherence
12 December 2016
Gowan: a rather beautiful coherence12 December 2016
James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings
23 November 2016
Marie–José Van Hee: Black Drawings23 November 2016
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Charles Barry: Travel Sketching
11 November 2016
Charles Barry: Travel Sketching11 November 2016
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The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee
9 November 2016
The Black Drawings of Marie-José Van Hee9 November 2016
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Louis Bricard
8 November 2016
Louis Bricard8 November 2016
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On Collecting
3 November 2016
On Collecting3 November 2016
This thrill in informally assembling material of different types from different centuries and places into narratives that are new and unfamiliar is based on probing what can be learned from the drawings themselves. Perhaps also to incite more and more varied use of them as cultural documents, as stimuli to… Read More
Paul Robbrecht
2 November 2016
Paul Robbrecht2 November 2016
Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More
The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective
24 October 2016
The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective24 October 2016
What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More
Alexander Brodsky
15 October 2016
Alexander Brodsky15 October 2016
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Sheds: Palaces of Nothing
9 October 2016
Sheds: Palaces of Nothing9 October 2016
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A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
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Nicholas Olsberg: Some Thoughts on Sheds
7 October 2016
Nicholas Olsberg: Some Thoughts on Sheds7 October 2016
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Fontaine
4 October 2016
Fontaine4 October 2016
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Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park
22 August 2016
Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park22 August 2016
In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More
Review: Found in Translation
21 August 2016
Review: Found in Translation21 August 2016
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Michael Graves
7 August 2016
Michael Graves7 August 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
The Stones of John Ruskin
1 August 2016
The Stones of John Ruskin1 August 2016
– Nicholas Olsberg and John Ruskin
What follows is a selection from the collection of minerals given to and arranged for St. David’s School, Reigate, by John Ruskin, who prepared a full printed Catalogue of the Collection of Siliceous Minerals, dated 1883. The collection is still largely intact. Stones were important to Ruskin’s view of architecture.… Read More
From the Desk of John Summerson
1 August 2016
From the Desk of John Summerson1 August 2016
The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.
Fontaine
1 August 2016
Fontaine1 August 2016
Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing as one of project design tools. By applying the methods of art history, one can trace colour as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural drawing and practice. While Italian Renaissance drawings… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt
22 July 2016
Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt22 July 2016
In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
15 July 2016
Friedensreich Hundertwasser15 July 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
Forty: Philip Webb
23 December 2016
Forty: Philip Webb23 December 2016
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detail domestic presentation