Category: drawing histories
François-Joseph Bélanger
4 June 2016
François-Joseph Bélanger4 June 2016
This drawing is one of more than twenty alternative designs for a room in the Paris mansion built for Anne-Victoire Dervieux opera dancer and, from 1794, the architect and designer Bélanger’s wife. Bélanger imagines for Dervieux a scheme of ‘Etruscan’ arabesques loosely inspired by the archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and… Read More
Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part II
31 May 2016
Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part II31 May 2016
The Imperial Palace of God
9 May 2016
The Imperial Palace of God9 May 2016
Inscribed by the artist: DEDICATED TO THE WORLD. THIS MAGNIFICENT ARCHITECTURAL, PERSPECTIVE VIEW, OF THE SECOND DIVISION, OF THE IMPERIAL PALACE OF GOD. IMPERIAL CROWN. EDUCATION FOR THE PEOPLE. GEORGE ELLIOT. EMPEROR OF THE WORLD. THE TRUE AND LAWFUL GOD. GEORGE THE 5, KING OF GREAT BRITAIN. SON OF THE… Read More
Ducros: Arch of Titus
1 May 2016
Ducros: Arch of Titus1 May 2016
This drawing by the Swiss artist Abraham-Louis-Alphonse Ducros — a preliminary sketch with a deep perspectival view of the Arch of Titus in Rome, and inspired by Panini’s Arch of Titus, 1745 — is the basis for one of his standard images, a definitive view of Rome sold to eighteenth-century… Read More
Adolfo Natalini: On Drawing
4 February 2016
Adolfo Natalini: On Drawing4 February 2016
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Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney
29 January 2016
Rem Koolhaas: EuroDisney29 January 2016
Looking up toward a glass ceiling, the drawing shows the atrium of this luxury hotel – a ‘bridge’, which was to connect an island to a park creating a sequence of flowing, layered landscapes both inside and outside. Using sinuous forms, rising to a view of the sky, Koolhaas turns… Read More
Michael Webb: Sin Centre
5 December 2015
Michael Webb: Sin Centre5 December 2015
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Three Projects
12 November 2015
Three Projects12 November 2015
I believe in the density of the sparse. The Diamond Thesis is both creative and analytical. It implies new points of view in architectural space. It delineates with clarity the frontal facet of isometric projection in the two-dimensional space of the picture plane of the drawings. The realisation that works… Read More
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City
6 November 2015
Archizoom, Andrea Branzi and the No-Stop City6 November 2015
Archizoom describe this ‘hypothetical theatre’ as part of a fluid and unstoppable culture, a non-stop metropolis re-imagined to fit the times, characterised by mobile theatres, unbound books, rooms without plan, unwritten music, … and cities made of voids. For the first time the presentation technique has … become a specific… Read More
Pier Vittorio Aureli
15 October 2015
Pier Vittorio Aureli15 October 2015
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
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives 1961–63
13 October 2015
Walter Pichler: 20 Sketches from the Archives 1961–6313 October 2015
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Jean-Baptiste Lassus
1 October 2015
Jean-Baptiste Lassus1 October 2015
The watercolour of the Sainte-Chapelle drawn by Lassus dates from the first years of the restoration, when the desire to restore the monument to its original thirteenth-century form was still very strong. The chapel is shown without its fifteenth-century flamboyant rose window and its exterior staircase built by Louis XII,… Read More
Constant’s New Babylon
3 September 2015
Constant’s New Babylon3 September 2015
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Paul Rudolph
28 August 2015
Paul Rudolph28 August 2015
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
28 August 2015
John Lautner28 August 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
Viollet-le-Duc
31 July 2015
Viollet-le-Duc31 July 2015
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
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
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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Charles de Wailly
10 June 2016
Charles de Wailly10 June 2016
The high level of ornamental detail and the conspicuously novel elements of stove and fountain suggest that this drawing may have been among those exhibition-drawings that de Wailly sent to the Paris Salon from 1771 onwards, the year he was controversially admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.… Read More
domestic interior presentation section