Tag: urban form
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10 October 2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10 October 2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Eric Parry: Iran, 1974
10 February 2019
Eric Parry: Iran, 197410 February 2019
If I now open the page – this sketchbook is different to rest because at that time, one had time. There was no planning to any of these. No A to Z or intention of a grand plan. For the months involved there is not much evidence, only a hint… Read More
Eric Parry: India, 1975
7 February 2019
Eric Parry: India, 19757 February 2019
This sketchbook results from a journey through west and northwest India focussed on the study of low-cost settlements in Bombay and Ahmedabad. It followed a seven-month period of research around nomadic environments in Iran and Kuwait. This mind- and eye-opening time was spent with colleague Andrew Thorne. Going back to… 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
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 1935
20 November 2018
Mussolini and the Tomb of Augustus in the Spring of 193520 November 2018
Fascist urban planning was animated by the fear that one might be looking at the wrong thing. Too many buildings from too many periods stopped vision from apprehending what ought to have interested it most, the monuments bequeathed to posterity by the classical past. Phrased differently: these monuments, or their… Read More
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett
11 November 2018
Theodore Conrad and Harvey Wiley Corbett11 November 2018
– Jennifer Gray and Irene Sunwoo
The fragment of Theodore Conrad’s 1929 cardboard model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company tower designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873–1954) — featured in the current exhibition Model Projections at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP — marks an early episode in the American model maker’s career and an experimental… Read More
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City
16 July 2018
A Fragment of Wright’s Great City16 July 2018
Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More
WilkinsonEyre
28 March 2018
WilkinsonEyre28 March 2018
This drawing presents a snapshot of the BIM model from the northern end of Battersea Power Station. Combined with a point cloud survey of the existing fabric, it overlays newer elements of construction with layers of the historic model. Careful selection of the information presented makes it possible to see… Read More
Behind the Lines 4
28 March 2018
Behind the Lines 428 March 2018
Isabella Puddefoot settled herself on the sofa, picked up her embroidery, and after enquiring about his day at the bank, remarked to her husband Samuel: ‘I do declare I am quite spent; running up and down stairs all day is very trying to my constitution. It is eight flights from dealing… Read More
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow
14 February 2018
Carlos Diniz: United States Embassy, Moscow14 February 2018
The Commons Overview These drawings will be exhibited in ‘Off Location: Drawings for the US Embassy, Moscow’, an impromptu exhibition held at Pushkin House from 13–28 February, 2–5 pm Monday–Saturday. In conjunction with the exhibition, curator Tim Abrahams will give a talk entitled ‘Fiction and Reality in Moscow’ at Pushkin… Read More
Shatwell DrawingScape
29 January 2018
Shatwell DrawingScape29 January 2018
This year a group of 12 students from the Intermediate School at the Architectural Association, London, are developing proposals for the Shatwell site. They take inspiration from the Drawing Matter collection to create exhibition spaces to display and celebrate the culture of drawing. The work ranges from speculative interpretations of… Read More
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures
11 January 2018
Yona Friedman: Space-chain Structures11 January 2018
‘Proteinic structures’, ‘proteinic chains’, ‘space chains’ and ‘iconostase’ are different names for similar structures, proposed and varied over the years by Yona Friedman. [1] They originally have in common a single material, metal, and a principle: the possibility of an infinite architecture. Such an unrealistic but visionary use of giant… Read More
The Sacred Games of Art
1 December 2017
The Sacred Games of Art1 December 2017
These images show a series of buildings and public spaces designed over the past decade on Victoria Street, some made intuitively in meetings, others in contemplation, and others as a way to try to communicate something. They also formed part of my PhD submission, and so are sometimes attempts to… Read More
Peter Smithson: Obelisk
12 October 2017
Peter Smithson: Obelisk12 October 2017
Peter Smithson’s influence predates slightly that of Cedric Price. It has also migrated to Shatwell, most notably in the recent re-erection of his wooden obelisk that first stood at Hadspen, commanding the view across the countryside. At Shatwell the obelisk takes on a more urban role (the design was originally… 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
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
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
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
Charles Barry: Travel Sketching
11 November 2016
Charles Barry: Travel Sketching11 November 2016
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
A Civic Utopia Exhibition
8 October 2016
A Civic Utopia Exhibition8 October 2016
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
Fontaine
4 October 2016
Fontaine4 October 2016
Sorry… this page has not yet been transferred to our new website. Check again soon.
Cedric Price: Bathat
8 August 2016
Cedric Price: Bathat8 August 2016
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
Behind the Lines 11
12 August 2019
Behind the Lines 1112 August 2019
– Philippa Lewis
Robert Schnebbelie peered into the Egyptian Hall wondering what freak show was on view, and then set himself down next door outside the oil and Italian warehouse, Sherborn & Sams. He looked across Piccadilly at the entrance to Burlington Arcade that created a neat endstop to the long wall of… Read More
behind the lines (series) commerce urban form