Period: c20th

Haus-Rücker-Co.

Haus-Rücker-Co.

This art collective – we might call them the ‘house thief company’ or ‘house drawing company’– took its name from a pun on the verb ‘to draw’ and an old slang word for ‘thief’. Their projects during this period involved interventions in which a house or building would be ‘stolen’… Read More

Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller

Slenderness, Lightness, and Strength.

Ugo la Pietra

Ugo la Pietra

Ugo La Pietra

Isolation or participation? The immersions were allusions to two contrary attitudes ever present in the deportment of so many in this era: a readiness to join the currents of social change or a determination to isolate oneself, waiting for what might be next. 

Preamble to a New World

Preamble to a New World

Constant

Stones speak. Towns speak. Ruins and skylines: the story of the people. From ‘Preamble to a New World,’ New Babylon, 1963.

Constant’s New Babylon

Constant’s New Babylon

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

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

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

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

Erik Gunnar Asplund

Erik Gunnar Asplund

Nicholas Olsberg

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

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

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

Wagnerschule

Wagnerschule

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Robert Bray

Robert Bray

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Jacques Couëlle

Jacques Couëlle

Jacques Couëlle

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

Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s

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 1900–1930s

Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1900–1930s

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part III

Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part III

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part I

Work on Paper: Future Scenarios, Part I

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Work on Paper, part IV: Displaced persons

Work on Paper, part IV: Displaced persons

Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.

Architectural anxiety

Architectural anxiety

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

Simplification

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

Landscape situations

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