Period: c20th
Jesse Reiser on Aldo Rossi
30 September 2017
Jesse Reiser on Aldo Rossi30 September 2017
In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More
USSR in Construction No. 9, 1931
1 September 2017
USSR in Construction No. 9, 19311 September 2017
Constructing a Fantasy of the New Moscow through Architectural Photographs In June 1931 Lazar Kaganovich, the Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a speech to the Moscow plenum entitled, Za sotsialisticheskuiu rekonstruktsiyu Moskvy i gorodov SSSR (On the Socialist Reconstruction of Moscow and other Socialist Cities of the USSR). The… Read More
Child’s Play
31 August 2017
Child’s Play31 August 2017
In 1972 Adolfo Natalini spent a few months in the United States. The main event of his visit was the seminal exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York MoMA (May 26 – September 11, 1972). Nevertheless, Natalini spent these months not only working on perhaps the most existential project of… Read More
Salvador Dalí
28 July 2017
Salvador Dalí28 July 2017
There is evidence that Salvador Dalí’s enigmatic study for a building facade is part of a real project, but we don’t know what that might be. The sketch resists interpretation and association, far different from anything else Dalí produced at the time: 1939 – a year in which he has… Read More
Dissecting
25 July 2017
Dissecting25 July 2017
Programme Notes: Drawing Matter, Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, Kingston School of Art Summer School The impossible whole It might be best to start this Summer School with a big question – what is the value of architecture? One way to think about such a general question might be to… Read More
Enric Miralles – La Gran Casa
22 July 2017
Enric Miralles – La Gran Casa22 July 2017
Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More
San Rocco
20 June 2017
San Rocco20 June 2017
This beautiful and black glossy image lies on top of the contrasting ground of a thick, white and matt-surfaced magazine binding. The substance of the drawing is not composed of lines but rather made of solid fields that recoil from each other, very neatly, to leave spaces. These slivers where… Read More
Guy Debord
7 June 2017
Guy Debord7 June 2017
‘But I must here, once and for all, inform you that all this will be more exactly delineated and explained in a map, now in the hands of the engraver … not to swell the work … but by way of commentary, scholium, illustration, and key to such passages, incidents,… Read More
Fred Scott
9 May 2017
Fred Scott9 May 2017
This is probably my first collage with such a serious intent. It came about while I was working with Robin Evans at the Architectural Association. I made it during the second term of our collaboration running Unit 4 in the Diploma School. We had set out to determine a possible… Read More
GOWAN DMC (SB6)
28 March 2017
GOWAN DMC (SB6)28 March 2017
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
Mario Sironi
27 March 2017
Mario Sironi27 March 2017
Politics as a Pretext for Making Mario Sironi compromised and traumatised in equal parts by his association with Italian Fascism, was known primarily as a painter and propagandist. He worked with and can be compared to Giuseppe Terragni, Mussolini’s most faithful architect, in his devotion to art as an ideological… Read More
Jean-Paul Jungmann
21 March 2017
Jean-Paul Jungmann21 March 2017
The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known… Read More
House II
17 March 2017
Scott and La Pietra
17 March 2017
Scott and La Pietra17 March 2017
In this drawing of his project for a house for a sculptor, Ugo La Pietra tries to criticise the boxiness of the standard house and the context of the city. Working to synthesise the forms and disciplines of art and architecture, he draws an enveloping free-form volume on pillars. This… Read More
Nigel Coates
10 March 2017
Nigel Coates10 March 2017
Executed after it opened, this drawing captures the intended vibrancy of one of my first built projects, a café tacked onto the front of a department store in downtown Shibuya. The architectural bricolage of the built space translated well into the mixed media technique of splurged acrylic paint, caked-on oil… Read More
On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond
9 March 2017
On Architectural Drawing: Lina Bo Bardi and Beyond9 March 2017
‘Please, draw a hand with three fingers folded and the index finger pointing, so that we can make the signs for the toilets and exits’, Lina Bo Bardi instructed me, but I hesitated. Timid in the early days of my internship and not knowing how to draw, I was being… Read More
Mogens Prip-Buus: Utzon
3 March 2017
Mogens Prip-Buus: Utzon3 March 2017
I had been working from late 1956 to 1957 with Vilhelm Wohlert on the schemes of Louisiana and the summerhouse for Niels Bohr, and suddenly there was no more work. Wohlert, who knew all my weaknesses (he had been my teacher in my fifth year at school) advised me to… Read More
Ellis: James Gowan
2 March 2017
Ellis: James Gowan2 March 2017
While typically, the architect employs the sketchbook as a raft by which to navigate the relentless flow of day-to-day practice, those that James Gowan assembled, across the course of his long professional life, served as a more elevated and leisurely mode of transport. Questions that he was addressing in the… Read More
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project
1 March 2017
Carlos Diniz: Weyerhaeuser Project1 March 2017
This remarkable drawing is a rendering by Carlos Diniz of the headquarters for the timber company Weyerhaeuser in Washington State from 1969, which he drew for the architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The completed building is stunning, of course: the concept of office design known as bürolandschaft, extended out into… Read More
Paolo Soleri
22 February 2017
Paolo Soleri22 February 2017
Over an advertisement for a series of workshops in the Arizona desert in 1979 ran the legend: ‘Soleri is in the desert not to escape the city for some pastoral dream but to create a wholly new urban civilization.’ It is not known when he started referring to himself in… Read More
Dorrian: Michael Webb
1 February 2017
Dorrian: Michael Webb1 February 2017
In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More
William Mann
31 January 2017
William Mann31 January 2017
Waiting Women ‘What’s it like?’: the experience of being there in a building is fundamental. That’s why we draw a lot in perspective (mostly eyeballed rather than constructed), because it offers the closest approximation to being there. But… moving through an urban environment formed by many buildings, reading signs, interpreting… Read More
Behind the Lines 1
22 September 2017
Behind the Lines 122 September 2017
– Philippa Lewis
I look at this drawing and imagine the following scenario: Rex Savidge, architect, is running short of time. He must submit his plan for a commercial development in Newcastle the following day. Giving it a last look over, he is generally pleased with it: he has taken particular care with the… Read More
behind the lines (series) commerce interior presentation projection (axonometric isometric) public space