Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Constant’s New Babylon
3 September 2015
Constant’s New Babylon3 September 2015
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Erik Gunnar Asplund
14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Wagnerschule
1 June 2015
Wagnerschule1 June 2015
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François Soufflot le Romain
9 February 2015
François Soufflot le Romain9 February 2015
This drawing, commissioned by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from his nephew in Rome, for presentation to his colleagues at the Académie Française, vindicates the revolutionary structural principles on which his own church of St Geneviève was then being slowly constructed in Paris. It does this by establishing a direct comparison with the… Read More
Jacques Couëlle
8 January 2015
Jacques Couëlle8 January 2015
Call it ‘Potomania’ — plants and flowers above all … a column of water cascading freely on to a little pond … the column a staff both shining and singing. — Jacques Couëlle
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s
29 November 2013
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s29 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1815–1900
27 November 2013
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1815–190027 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part I: Shifting scales and structures The transformation of the modern metropolis is not so much about expanding urban mats and changing topographic patterns as about how architects responded, structure by structure and type by type, to the shifting scales, capacities and ways of working that the city demanded of… Read More
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1900–1930s
26 November 2013
Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1900–1930s26 November 2013
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Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part III
3 June 2013
Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part III3 June 2013
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Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part I
30 May 2013
Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part I30 May 2013
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Work on Paper, part IV: Displaced persons
3 October 2012
Work on Paper, part IV: Displaced persons3 October 2012
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Architectural anxiety
28 September 2011
Architectural anxiety28 September 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More
Simplification
6 May 2011
Simplification6 May 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More
Landscape situations
21 January 2011
Landscape situations21 January 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. “He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.” With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More
Preamble to a New World
4 September 2015
Preamble to a New World4 September 2015
– Constant
Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.
domestic elevation presentation publication sketch theoretical & imaginary urban form