One of a series of short accounts of innovative houses from 1500 to the present prepared for an unrealised book. — Of all Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, Fallingwater is one with the most universal appeal. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1938, the house instantly captured the world’s imagination. It is not hard to understand why. Standing atop a large waterfall on Bear Run, a mountain stream south east…

One of a series of short accounts of innovative houses from 1500 to the present prepared for an unrealised book. — The island of Capri, lying off the Sorrentine Peninsula in the shadow of Vesuvius in the Tyrrhenian Sea, has always been a place of retreat. The island has been inhabited since ancient times. During the first century AD, the Emperor Tiberius built himself no less than twelve villas on the…

One of a series of short accounts of innovative houses from 1500 to the present prepared for an unrealised book. — A house with hardly any walls? It’s hard to imagine but that is exactly what Japanese architect, Sou Fujimoto, created for a family in Tokyo in 2012. The house stands at three storeys tall, yet each of these storeys is subdivided into different intersecting platforms and floors. In plan and…

A short account of James Stirling and James Gowan’s Dining and Assembly Hall for a school in Camberwell, South London — designed at the same time as their seminal University of Leicester Engineering Building — I stumbled upon this gem of a building as I tried to make a shortcut while walking to Camberwell from Kennington, where I live. …

The sixth and final post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, exploring the relationship between architecture, drawing and AR. — Zaha was, of course, far from the only figure to recognise and attempt to characterise — whether visually or in theory — the speeded up and fragmented state of reality in the 1980s. One of the most influential was the French theorist, Jean Baudrillard, best known for his concept of…

The fifth post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Zaha Hadid’s Drawing of IBA Housing scheme, Berlin, 1986 — The final drawing I want to look at is this by Zaha Hadid: for an IBA Housing scheme in Berlin, made in 1986, with the project completing in 1993 — one of her first but least known built projects. The drawing is relatively pared back in contrast to her more…

The fourth post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Bruno Taut‘s drawing from Alpine Architecture (1918) — Next, and briefer still, I want to talk about this drawing (or print of a drawing) from Bruno Taut’s Alpine Architecture, published in 1918. It is one of 30 annotated drawings (22 monochromatic and eight coloured plates) by Taut that present powerful vision of new city, perhaps even a new…

The third post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Joseph Michael Gandy’s Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1815, first exhibited 1818 — The second, shorter case-study is Joseph Michael Gandy’s Public and Private Buildings Executed by Sir John Soane between 1780 and 1815. It was first exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1818 and since the mid 1820s has hung behind the first planes in Soane’s…

The second post in my series on ‘drawing and reality’, focusing on Nicholas Hawksmoor‘s Study for the west-end towers of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1699–1700 — The first drawing I am going to look at is this rather intriguing drawing by Nicholas Hawksmoor from 1699–1700 for the west-end towers of St Paul’s Cathedral. I’m not going to linger on the history other than to say that Hawksmoor entered the office of Christopher as an eighteen year…