Period: c20th

Lähteenmäki: Superstudio

Lähteenmäki: Superstudio

Markus Lähteenmäki

It is distinctive that in Superstudio’s practice, the search for the means of manifestation was as rigorous as the research itself. The first major work where Superstudio seems to have found the pace it was to follow was Un Viaggio nelle Regioni della Ragione. This project, first appearing in 1966 and… Read More

Catrina Beevor

Catrina Beevor

Catrina Beevor

These drawings from 1987 formed part of NATØ’s Heathrow Airport project, exhibited in The British Edge show at the ICA Boston, USA, in the same year. The proposal (in the first drawing) shows an Arrivals landscape spectacularised by indoctrination booths: cricket, the NHS, weather, accents… In the middle distance (depicted… Read More

Olsberg: Gordon Matta-Clark

Olsberg: Gordon Matta-Clark

Nicholas Olsberg

During a poetry reading at St Mark’s Church in the East Village of New York in 1973 Gordon Matta-Clark announced that he would draw on a roll of butcher paper an account of the history of architecture with a single long stroke of the pen. At the conclusion he would… Read More

Jungmann: L’art tue

Jungmann: L’art tue

Jean-Paul Jungmann

L’ART TUE [Art Kills] L’ART TUE was the the name of a poster project, most likely between 1975 and 1976. It followed the theoretical and literary Groupe Utopie [Utopia Group] adventure and their publications between 1966 and 1969, and after the Aerolande development work which lasted until 1975. However, it came… Read More

Stalder: Projected Sections

Stalder: Projected Sections

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Black Airground

Black Airground

Jeffrey Shaw

For Black Airground the artists – Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver and Sean Wellesley-Miller – positioned three black military surplus parachutes in a row on the floor of the gallery in the Oxford Museum of Art, entirely filling the exhibition space. Weighted around their rims with sand, these parachutes were continuously inflated with… Read More

Gowan: a rather beautiful coherence

Gowan: a rather beautiful coherence

Charles Rice

James Gowan’s Section through house with mechanical services is a presentation drawing made as part of his scheme for ninety-eight council dwellings in East Hanningfield, Essex, completed in 1978. What we might call the ‘image’ of the East Hanningfield scheme is given by the large round windows which mark the façades… Read More

Peter Myers

Peter Myers

Peter Myers

It is a truism that aggressive building contractors treat architectural drawings with contempt; McAlpine’s were no exception and it being my temporary responsibility in 1969 to negotiate a procedure of actually constructing the visible fair faced in-situ concrete of this vast structure, I arrived at The Brunswick’s site office ready for a… Read More

Peter Wilson: A Public Convenience Remembered

Peter Wilson: A Public Convenience Remembered

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Paul Robbrecht

Paul Robbrecht

Rosemary Willink

Watercolour is not the traditional medium one associates with architectural plans, particularly those that are realised in built form. I believe this is what caught my eye while searching for a drawing by Walter Pichler and instead discovered a portfolio of drawings by Paul Robbrecht. Aue Paviljoenen project B depicts… Read More

The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective

The Double or Panoramic Structure of the Perspective

Desley Luscombe

What is compelling about the sketches of Mies van der Rohe is their reliance on a pictorial composition that actively distorts perspectival conventions. This type of distortion is evident consistently across his more finished presentations drawings as well as his sketches. In using perspective as his main visualising tool Mies… Read More

Auerbach: Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

Auerbach: Stone Adversaries – Ruskin’s Rocks, Hejduk’s Diamonds

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Sheds: Palaces of Nothing

Sheds: Palaces of Nothing

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Nicholas Olsberg: Some Thoughts on Sheds

Nicholas Olsberg: Some Thoughts on Sheds

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Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park

Richard J. Neutra: Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Park

Nicholas Olsberg

In 1941, the US National Park Service acquired one of numerous versions of a 360-degree cyclorama, an in-the-round painting of the turning point in the great rebellion against the American union at Gettysburg in July 1863. First painted 20 years after the battle, the panels filled a drum 80 feet… Read More

Review: Found in Translation

Review: Found in Translation

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Cedric Price: Bathat

Cedric Price: Bathat

Helen Mallinson

Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More

Michael Graves

Michael Graves

Helen Thomas

When they were made and for a long while afterwards the drawings of Michael Graves were influential for a generation of American, Canadian and British architecture students who coveted their fine papers, delicate colouring techniques and characterful hand-drawn lines in pencil and ink. These all seemed so appropriate to the… Read More

From the Desk of John Summerson

From the Desk of John Summerson

The cat was called ‘Puss’. Anthony Vidler recalls that it ‘was fierce, and farted underneath the desk’.

Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt

Mies van der Rohe: Neue Stadt

Markus Lähteenmäki

In the photographs most often reproduced of the Glass Skyscraper by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the tower stands in the middle of a clay model of an old city. The model acts as a presentation of an imagined reality, of what it might be when built. The beacon of… Read More

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Helen Thomas

Hauteurs de Macchu-Picchu, or the Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem by Pablo Neruda written in 1945 that embraces a visit he made to the site in Peru, and includes within it a critique of modern life. The mountainous location is echoed in the form of this pile of… Read More

Seven Farmyards

Seven Farmyards

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Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building

Louis Kahn: Kansas City Office Building

The Kansas City Office Building – never built but designed in many variations between 1966 and Louis Kahn’s death in 1974, in close collaboration with the structural engineer August Komendant – is a clear example of the poetics of weight and mass in contrast with prevailing ideals of structural lightness.… Read More

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More