Medium: model
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23 April 2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23 April 2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
The Garden of Earthly Delights
9 April 2020
The Garden of Earthly Delights9 April 2020
The essay is an excerpt from Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, by Hamed Khosravi, published by Hatje Cantz. Pre-order through the publisher’s website or visiting www.guevrekian.org.
Gowan on the English House
1 April 2020
Gowan on the English House1 April 2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Sky Architecture
2 March 2020
Sky Architecture2 March 2020
On this day in 1933, a certain gorilla scaled the Empire State Building. King Kong might have had an easier time if he had taken the lift. This design for the elevator shaft, by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, is held in the Drawing Matter collection. Here are are more examples… Read More
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’
28 February 2020
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’28 February 2020
– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier
19 February 2020
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier19 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita
5 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita5 February 2020
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
8 January 2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino8 January 2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche
13 November 2019
Henry van de Velde and a monument to Nietzsche13 November 2019
Count Harry Kessler – the German aristocrat, publisher, patron and friend of seemingly everyone in the European avant-garde – had long had in mind a worthy monument to his idol, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose seventieth birthday would be celebrated on 15 October 1914. Beginning in February 1911, Kessler began sending letters… Read More
Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space. French architect Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine made this cut-out paper model of an interior in or before 1804, the year in which his famous client, Napoleon, became emperor. It represents a simply… Read More
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard
19 September 2019
Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard19 September 2019
Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More
Dom Hans van der Laan
19 August 2019
Dom Hans van der Laan19 August 2019
On 23 November 1968 the Dutch architect and Benedictine monk Dom Hans van der Laan unfolded an eighteenth-century piece of fabric, the Douglas tartan, in order to explain the mechanisms of space to his students. Alongside his brother Nico, van der Laan had been teaching a course in church architecture,… Read More
Learning from the tortoise
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
The Matter of Drawing
3 August 2019
The Matter of Drawing3 August 2019
The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More
Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919
9 February 2019
Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 19199 February 2019
The drawing is thinking, the same mark used over and over, up and down, hurdling scales quickly, the pulled edge of the sheet mimics the line. There is one idea – on the right, closer up – a study after or rehearsal for the three-quarter view bleached out from the… Read More
Zaha Hadid
27 November 2018
Zaha Hadid27 November 2018
When in January 1983, Peter Cook reviewed a recently held exhibition for Zaha Hadid’s 59 Eaton Place, he spoke of the resonance between the individual and their education in developing an architectural identity. [1] He pondered on the development of Hadid over that period, ‘What if fate had led her to… Read More
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett
11 November 2018
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett11 November 2018
– Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo
The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More
Hugh Strange Architects
2 October 2018
Hugh Strange Architects2 October 2018
We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16 July 2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16 July 2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House
26 April 2018
Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House26 April 2018
Somebody said the story about the orange is not right, but it is: he sent one of us over to the shop to buy an orange and he peeled it and took up the segments. Mogens Prip-Buus on Jørn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing
14 January 2018
Studio Mumbai: Saatrasta-Mahindra Tape Drawing14 January 2018
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
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures
11 January 2018
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures11 January 2018
‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension
28 April 2020
Cadbury-Brown: Royal College of Art Extension28 April 2020
– Lionel Brett
The counter-reformation did not last long. In the end I think what reconciled us was that everything I attempted failed. By way of diversion from internal dissension, like any politician, I switched to foreign affairs. There were two things which, as an architect, I was expected to achieve for the… Read More
competition education elevation