Tag: presentation
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
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Spaghetti with Meatballs
20 January 2020
Spaghetti with Meatballs20 January 2020
I was born in Berlin in 1943 and came to the US in 1949 when my father got a position at the University of Illinois. I was interested in history, art and mathematics, so I studied architecture there. I interrupted my studies to work in an office in San Francisco… Read More
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13 January 2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13 January 2020
Raymond Loewy’s contribution to NASA was not rocket science. It was one small sketch for mankind. But, like everything the designer ever did, the real significance of these fascinating sketches was outrageously bigged-up by their author. In his blindingly flashy oeuvre, their status is comparable to his (infamous) work for Coca-Cola.… Read More
Aldo & Adolf
13 December 2019
Aldo & Adolf13 December 2019
And architecture itself? Architecture is still the central theme of Loos’s thought, and among his essays is a piece on the competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, a piece, which, like the one on the Michaelerhaus and ‘Ornament and Crime,’ is essential to the understanding of the meaning of architecture. This… 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
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
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
Behind the Lines 10
19 June 2019
Behind the Lines 1019 June 2019
It was undoubtedly the doing of that ancient buffer Lutyens, Samuel Hardy reflected sourly, as he stared at the pages of the September 1932 issue of The Builder and saw an illustration of the winning entry. It showed Mr Edward H Banks of ‘Villa Desiré’, Downlands Road, Purley, Surrey’s awful concoction of… 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
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
Kurt Forster
8 February 2019
Kurt Forster8 February 2019
Schinkel’s architecture is of a piece with his life, yet in various ways, by picturing and publishing the work, he took himself out of it. He wanted to make sure that his architecture could stand on its own, however deeply it had been a part of him. He was, in… Read More
Behind the Lines 9
2 February 2019
Behind the Lines 92 February 2019
Cyril Ponsonby walked anxiously from where he was staying in Wilbury Road, Hove over to the Hotel Metropole on the Brighton sea front. It was 1907, a sunny day in early August. He was hot and bothered. Under his arm he held a sheaf of papers. He went through 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
With Superstudio in Yesterday’s Tomorrow
23 December 2018
With Superstudio in Yesterday’s Tomorrow23 December 2018
‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More
Behind the Lines 8
4 December 2018
Behind the Lines 84 December 2018
Annette Berthe Schlegel, wife of Adalbert, mother of Mariana, Friedrich, Werner and Elmira, and grandmother to little Wilhelm and Lydia, died peacefully in her cherry wood bed at home in Marienstrasse, Stuttgart, on March 29th, 1812. Adalbert, a successful watchmaker, had held Annette dear, and two weeks after the funeral… 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
Behind the Lines 14
3 February 2020
Behind the Lines 143 February 2020
– Philippa Lewis
These are just insignificant sketches, but they remind me of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in 1937; by night it was a unique experience – mémorable. You see, one theme of the exposition was light and water: an expression of what could be achieved with the power of modern electricity,… Read More
behind the lines (series) civic & municipal presentation public space topographic/cartographic