Category: design methodologies

Dismantled Sketchbook

Dismantled Sketchbook

James Gowan

To some extent this is the battle-ground of the British architectural avant-garde; the incompatibilities of graphics and architecture, the freedom that the former allows and the restrictions that the latter asserts. In recent years, the graphics have got smoother whilst the dialectic has remained largely unresolved. A conclusive project is… Read More

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Pier Vittorio Aureli

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor is a set of drawings I’ve produced since 2001. They are an investigation into what, in the absence of a better definition, I’ve called ‘non-compositional architecture’. Since the very beginning, I’ve conceived of these drawings as something to be executed by the simplest of means,… Read More

Paul Rudolph

Paul Rudolph

Paul Rudolph

I try to find a graphic means of indicating what’s happening to the space. Space can move quickly or slowly. It can twist and turn. Space extends the dynamics of any building, because if the thrusting and counter-thrusting of the spaces aren’t balanced, then people feel unstable, the building doesn’t… Read More

John Lautner

John Lautner

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History & Origins

History & Origins

Aldo Rossi

And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is useful only to fix the design, to transmit to one’s client and one’s… Read More

Viollet-le-Duc

Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

From a letter to Mérimée written in 1843 from Vézelay: You, Sir, who have ceaselessly lived the life of the past, you understand the joy, the secret happiness felt when we can record in our sketchbook some of these forgotten [historical] treasures … but how much more interesting when these… Read More

Five Boxes

Five Boxes

Michael Craig-Martin

Line drawing — drawing without shading, cross-hatching or chiaroscuro — permits and conveys the most precise sense of accuracy of any kind of drawing. The facts are laid bare, nothing can be fudged or obscured. Leonardo used line drawing for his studies of everything from flying machines to the human… Read More