Tag: elevation
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer
2 January 2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer2 January 2020
Towards the end of my architectural studies in the late 1960s I moved into a little house near the Prinsenhof neighbourhood of Ghent. My neighbours were Ghent people, and my landlord owned the whole block. Every month he would collect rent, and although he didn’t talk to most people, he… Read More
From a little below and to the right
17 December 2019
From a little below and to the right17 December 2019
There is a characteristic recurrence in Lutyens’ drawings of a quickly sketched oblique perspective in his own hand. Apparently, this is added as an afterthought once the orthogonal image of the building itself has been fully developed elsewhere (sometimes by assistants), and both usually appear on the same sheet. Invariably,… Read More
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments
9 December 2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments9 December 2019
The following text was first published in 1977 in an issue of AD Profiles dedicated to the Millbank Housing Competition. Run by the Crown Estate, the competition to develop a site adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge attracted nearly five hundred entries, including proposals from Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,… 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
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
7 November 2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson7 November 2019
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23 September 2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23 September 2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism
21 September 2019
Josef Frank: Happy Accidentism21 September 2019
In the summer of 1947, the Austrian architect and designer Josef Frank began a brief but intense correspondence with his lover, Dagmar Grill, which took the form of thirteen sketch-proposals for a single-family house. Since emigrating to Sweden in 1933, Frank had carried out numerous interior design commissions through his… 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
On Cornices, Part I
17 June 2019
On Cornices, Part I17 June 2019
In 1806, the civil servant Karl Tilebein and his wife were looking for an architect to design their new country house in Züllchow, Pomerania. They contacted the young Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who, having recently returned from a two-year grand tour of Italy, was back in Berlin eking out… Read More
Eric Parry on Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974
5 April 2019
Eric Parry on Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 19745 April 2019
This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… Read More
Fred Scott: On Gowan Stirling
1 March 2019
Fred Scott: On Gowan Stirling1 March 2019
This odd-shaped, yellowed analysis drawing by James Gowan, drawn directly onto heavy paper isn’t dated, and was probably added to years after the drawing was nearly complete. Ellis Woodman describes the drawing as ‘that drawing that James always kept in the box with his sketchbooks’. Unusually, when I first saw… Read More
Boompjes II
28 February 2019
Boompjes II28 February 2019
Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… Read More
Boompjes I
22 February 2019
Boompjes I22 February 2019
In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More
Roosevelt Island
17 February 2019
Roosevelt Island17 February 2019
The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More
Kurfürstendamm
16 February 2019
Kurfürstendamm16 February 2019
Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… 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
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1
19 January 2019
Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 119 January 2019
– Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb
Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More
Dance Dance Revolution
30 December 2018
Dance Dance Revolution30 December 2018
In 1788, the art theorist and critic Quatremère de Quincy devoted a long entry of the Encyclopédie méthodique to the arabesque, ‘forms of ornament that are often the most capricious, fantastical, and imaginary, whether in sculpture or painting, that architecture employs in the decoration of walls, panels, door-frames, pilasters, friezes, and sometimes even… Read More
TEd’A Arquitectes
15 November 2018
TEd’A Arquitectes15 November 2018
– Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez
‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More
Commonplace
12 November 2018
Commonplace12 November 2018
In 1877, London’s Building News reprinted – as the ‘work of two eminent architects, though it cannot be said to be their joint production’ – an elevation, plan, and partial section published by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc as a model town house, noting that this supposed ‘London Residence’ had been adapted – with due… Read More
Behind the Lines 7
31 October 2018
Behind the Lines 731 October 2018
Mr. Tassie’s House On June 27th 1807 William Tassie scratched his long nose, dipped a pen in the inkwell, and finished off his letter to Alexander Wilson Esq of Messrs. Dunlop & Wilson, Booksellers of Glasgow: ‘I have been near a twelve month engaged with alterations in my house –… Read More
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 1980
23 October 2018
Madelon Vriesendorp and Rem Koolhaas at Van Rooy Gallery, 198023 October 2018
On 1 October 1980, at the height of postmodernism, Luce van Rooy opened her gallery in Amsterdam, around the corner from the Stedelijk Museum. [1] In a recent interview van Rooy reflects on the history of the gallery: the idea – what she calls a gallery for ‘architecture and related… Read More
Six Architects on their Dream Desks
17 December 2019
Six Architects on their Dream Desks17 December 2019
– Roz Barr, Biba Dow, Elizabeth Hatz, Emma Letizia Jones, Stephanie Macdonald and Helen Thomas
Drawing Matter recently acquired this design for a table, below. Although the work’s last sale in 1972 attributed the drawing to Thomas Chippendale, we are (perhaps wishfully) hoping that it might be an architect’s own design for desk. The sheet set off a flurry of chatter about the platonic spaces… Read More
detail elevation furniture & object design presentation projection (axonometric isometric) publication