Category: drawing histories

Niall McLaughlin

Niall McLaughlin

Niall McLaughlin

ALZHEIMER’S RESPITE CENTRE, DUBLIN We had six sites to look at and we did a feasibility study for each one. We eventually ended up with one which in many ways is not very satisfactory for people with dementia because it is an eighteenth-century walled garden. But what we did was… Read More

R. Norman Shaw

R. Norman Shaw

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G. E. Street: Drawing on Moulding

G. E. Street: Drawing on Moulding

Take Courage

Take Courage

Freddie Phillipson

Architecture is born of experience, yet its realisation depends in no small measure on belief. Most buildings owe their existence primarily to evidence – the demonstrable proofs of the benefits they provide – for intuition must always be interrogated to justify the confidence placed in the architect. But the mysterious… Read More

AL_A

AL_A

Amanda Levete

Farshid Moussavi’s brief for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition asked for representations of the complexities of designing and realising buildings and structures. We illustrated this by overlaying each level of intervention in a different colour – from the existing V&A stonework in green, the services in purple, to the… Read More

Louis Le Vau

Louis Le Vau

Basile Baudez, Alexandre Cojannot and Alexandre Gady

Built in the 16th century on the banks of the river Seine, west of Paris, the castle of Meudon stands amidst the great French Renaissance monuments that were ultimately destroyed. When it was bought by Abel Servien in 1654, the old castle – built under François I in brick and stone… Read More

Herzog & de Meuron

Herzog & de Meuron

Herzog & de Meuron

A pair of drawings – a plan and a still image from a digital model – act like X-rays revealing the hidden forces at play in a complex project that brings together public and private uses including concert halls, plazas, restaurants, hotel functions, and residences, all in one building. The… Read More

Mark Dorrian

Mark Dorrian

Mark Dorrian

When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More

Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow

Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow

The Commons Overview These drawings will be exhibited in ‘Off Location: Drawings for the US Embassy, Moscow’, an impromptu exhibition held at Pushkin House from 13–28 February, 2–5 pm Monday–Saturday. In conjunction with the exhibition, curator Tim Abrahams will give a talk entitled ‘Fiction and Reality in Moscow’ at Pushkin… Read More

Stan Allen: On Drawings’ Conclusions

Stan Allen: On Drawings’ Conclusions

Stan Allen

The Campo Marzio project had its origins in a series of drawings done as far back as 1979, when I was a student at Cooper Union. I entered Cooper as a transfer student with a BA already in hand. I was originally placed in second year, but after a semester… Read More

Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons

Better with Sun from West: US Embassy Moscow, The Commons

Tim Abrahams

In an interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, architect Charles Edward Bassett, the design lead in SOM’s San Francisco office, was asked by Betty J. Blum how architectural education changed in the US when modernism became accepted in architectural schools and the Beaux-Arts tradition side-lined. What happened when the… Read More

Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami

Florian Beigel & Kisa Kawakami

Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing

Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing

Studio Mumbai Bijoy Jain

The idea of using tape drawings originated for climatic reasons: India goes through a five-month monsoon season each year, and during this time it is very humid. For us this meant that the drawings we were producing, which were printed on paper, had a very short lifespan. Lines would slowly… Read More

Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont

Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont

This large and exquisite drawing by Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont represents a garden design in the form of the plan of St Peter’s Basilica and Piazza by Bernini. Serried ranks of trees rather than stone walls and columns are used to marshal a vast landscape into a perfect emblem of… Read More

Sir William Chambers: Somerset House

Sir William Chambers: Somerset House

Approximately 700 drawings of Sir William Chambers’ eighteenth-century design for Somerset House reside at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Yet, to start, it was not at all certain that Chambers would get the commission. At that point in his career he was Comptroller of the Works under King George III, a… Read More

Anthony Salvin

Anthony Salvin

Matthew Wells

As Torquay expanded in the mid-nineteenth century with the town’s prominence as a seaside retreat and a connection to the South Devon railway made in 1848, new churches were built to accommodate the increased number of parishioners and seasonal visitors. Whilst construction of the new church of St Mary Magdalene… Read More

Gilles-Marie Oppenord

Gilles-Marie Oppenord

David Pullins

For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More

William Butterfield

William Butterfield

Nicholas Olsberg

Nothing Permitted But What Has Been Foreseen William Butterfield eschewed the illustrative perspective, preferring instead to develop even his studies as contract drawings that would serve three tasks: as presentations through which a project could be comprehended, as instructions from which his contractors and clients could not swerve, and as… Read More

The Sacred Games of Art

The Sacred Games of Art

Patrick Lynch

These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More

Herbert Matter

Herbert Matter

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the work of the Swiss photographer and designer Herbert Matter, who after a short career in New York had moved to California in 1943 with his wife, the American painter and art critic Mercedes Carles. Both were friends and associates of Fernand Leger, with whom Herbert had been… Read More

Dogma: The Room of One’s Own

Dogma: The Room of One’s Own

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara

The Architecture of the Private Room These drawings are part of a series of 48 perspectives that depict the ‘private’ room from antiquity to the present day. They comprise a study of the private room as a specific architectural form. Each perspective is taken with a more or less consistent… Read More

Michael Gold: Crossed Swords

Michael Gold: Crossed Swords

Alvar Aalto

Alvar Aalto

Markus Lähteenmäki

For whatever reason it is produced, a blueprint solidifies a moment in the design process and further solidifies the project. It is not necessarily the final moment, and often after the blueprints have been produced they might be annotated by one or the other master, resulting in new drawings from… Read More

Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson

Peter Wilson

The seven Clandeboye drawings, each 35 × 35 cm and on A2 trace, were produced in 1984. The year is significant. Then the AA was busy maintaining a posture of indifference to Jenksian postmodernism, while the possibly visionary (at least in the case of architectural speculation) and certainly introspective 1970s… Read More