Desley Luscombe | University of Technology Sydney (original) (raw)
Papers by Desley Luscombe
Interstices: journal of architecture and related arts, Mar 15, 2013
Much attention in the last few years has been focused on environmental change, material waste, ec... more Much attention in the last few years has been focused on environmental change, material waste, economic disparity, and the rapid migration of industry. Planned obsolescence, disposability, biodegradation and similar progressive material processes can provide a new model for reconciling cultural desires for more with a sustainable mandate for less. Rather than viewing the design of the built environment as means to a single, complete "finished product", transformative material processes can be applied as opportunistic and systematic strategies for designed environments that can productively evolve over time. There is an abundance of underutilized built space in the world today, particularly in areas with shifting industrial and economic resources. As buildings in these areas are abandoned, recyclable materials are stripped from them leaving the bulk of the building material left unprotected and exposed to accelerated decay. Ultimately, the ability to recycle proportionately small amounts of the building material renders a large portion of the material unusable again, producing a huge amount of unnecessary waste. Because we design for a building's durability in terms of total assembly, we overlook opportunities to think of the built environment in terms of replaceable assemblies of varying durabilities. One useful model for a component-based way of designing is found with the widespread use of paper collars, cuffs and shirtfronts in men's fashion in the mid-19 th century. The restructuring of the shirt to provide for single disposable components lengthened the life of the body of the shirt and allowed for durability to adjust according to the use patterns inherent in particular areas of the shirt structure. By acknowledging a variation of needs for durability in this case and making something strategically and variably disposable, overall durability and functionality were extended with minimal waste. This presentation will examine new modes of material and spatial assembly in the built environment that embrace obsolescence, disposability and biodegradability and design for varying permanence in built environments that can accommodate modern migrations of industry, capital and population.
Interstices: journal of architecture and related arts, Mar 15, 2013
This article explores the first solo exhibition of the drawings and paintings created by Zaha Had... more This article explores the first solo exhibition of the drawings and paintings created by Zaha Hadid. It was held at the Luce Van Room Gallery, Amsterdam
Lund Humphries eBooks, 2019
When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rie... more When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rietveld Schröder House (GA 68) it encapsulated the representation of an apparently unproblematic historical occurrence. Included, were drawings and photographs, contextualised through commentary by the curator of the Rietveld archive in Utrecht, Ida van Zijl. Gerrit Rietveld had been the exempla of "Dutch" and De Stijl characteristics of the modern since the completion of the Schröder House in 1924. By the mid-century, Rietveld's position in architectural history had been reinforced through the exhibition and publication of drawings and models in centres of artistic dominance like Venice, New York and his birthplace, the Netherlands. As with the Futagawa publication, these exhibitions and their catalogues were presented without referencing any issues that might be raised associated with their content. Yet, recent assertions by staff at the Rietveld Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, bring to light questions of attribution and provenance and a growing debate surrounding the use of specific illustrations. At issue is the provenance of the axonometric illustrations most commonly placed beside photographs of the Schröder House as evidence of a moment of synthesis in its design. While the complicated history of their provenance might seem of little concern to explaining Rietveld's architecture, recognition of the provenance of any art work brings with it historical questions including its contemporaneous setting with implications for possible influences, concepts of representation, and techniques of production. Changes in dates and locations of conception and completion significantly modify the relationship between the artefact, its content and the intellectual processes that influence its creation. Curators at the Rietveld archive have verbally asserted the date of the axonometric illustrations to be as late as 1951 and therefore conceptually questionable in its inclusion in new exhibitions of De Stijl during the mid-century. If this were true, Rietveld may have been in the process of reconstructing his own historical dominance in the De Stijl movement using the axonometric technique as representation of the concepts of the house.
Architectural Theory Review, 2005
This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the... more This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the figure of the architect as constructs within historical notions of the social. By examining a single illustration, the frontispiece to Sebastiano Serlio's. II lerzo libro, the paper argues that the frontispiece portrays a correspondence between the technical conventions of the architect with the concepts and principles of the discipline. The frontispiece didactically states that the architect is able to fulfil the role implicit in ‘Nature.’ to transform the ‘licentiousness’ of antique architecture through reason and judgment, and through this transformation bring ideals of decorum lo concepts of the social through architecture. The paper shows thai for late Renaissance Italy, the architect is represented as intellectually autonomous from, while dependent on. structures of governmentality and patronage for the formation of the discipline. This formulation enabled the architect to represent the social through architecture's resolution of the competing circumstances of the city.1
The Journal of Architecture, 2020
The sketch has long occupied a privileged position in architecture as the conceptual origin of a ... more The sketch has long occupied a privileged position in architecture as the conceptual origin of a realised building. However, this privilege is also problematic, as it obscures the greater intellectual basis of the sketch. This contributes to architecture’s disciplinary development and experimentation. Analysing one sketch drawn by Zaha Hadid in the process of designing the MAXXI in Rome, this article aims to offer ways to reconsider the role of the sketch. Two analyses are carried out to unravel the greater significance of the sketch in architecture. The first relies on the ideational function of the line in architectural practice, as proposed by Andrew Benjamin. The second studies the line in relation to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘smooth space’. These writings on the role of the line form an important basis that questions the nature of abstraction in the sketch. Taken together, these two analyses and Hadid’s earlier explorations of architectural space generate alternative meanings to the lines of her sketch for the MAXXI. Finally, the article questions the figure of the architect in relation to their own sketches. I argue that it is often the architect who redefines how sketches are interpreted over time, and find their place in a specific teleology of development. In conclusion, the sketch is a complex fragment in the realisation of a building. It has broad experimental implications for the discipline.
Architectural Theory Review, 1996
Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatise of the Renaissance. They rep... more Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatise of the Renaissance. They represent disciplinary boundaries, aspirations and disputes in their graphic content. In addition, they place these internal concerns in the broader context of the political, aesthetic and technical concerns of their time tracing the architect's role in this process.
This study investigates the changing understanding of the role of the ‘architect ’ in Italy durin... more This study investigates the changing understanding of the role of the ‘architect ’ in Italy during the sixteenth century by examining frontispieces to published architectural treatises. From analysis of these illustrations four attributes emerge as important to new societal understandings of the role of ‘architect. ’ The first attribute is the desire to delineate the boundaries of knowledge for architecture as a discipline, relevant to sixteenth-century society. The second is the depiction of the ‘architect, ’ as an intellectual engaged in the resolution of practical, political, economic and philosophical considerations of his practice. The third represents the ‘architect ’ having a specific domain of activity in the design of civic spaces of magnificence not only for patrons but also for the city per se. The fourth represents the ‘architect ’ and society as perceiving a commonality of an architectural role beyond the boundary of individual locations and patrons. Five treatises meet...
Fabrications: the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 1989
Volume 1 of 'Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia ... more Volume 1 of 'Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand' (Including cover).
Fabrications: the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 1989
Publication information, Table of Contents, forward by Judith Brine, editorial by Desley Luscombe
Many Renaissance treatises on architecture included an allegorical frontispiece that portrayed bo... more Many Renaissance treatises on architecture included an allegorical frontispiece that portrayed both the discipline and the purveyor of architecture as having attributes that were social, ethical and moral in purpose. While Alberti in his De re aedifi catoria reinforced the importance of virtus for citizenry, these illustrations join the concept of virtus with that of disegno in the architect’s attributes.1 Allegorical frontispieces took an understanding of the architect beyond the role of designer of buildings. As a model citizen with responsibility for the visual representations of a governed society, he was represented as capable of forming architectural space and imagery, designed and organised by a programme of invenzione that inscribed political intent able to be read in the context of the court.2 Biographical texts, written in the same period, emulated the representation of the architect in the allegorical illustrations and presented, through the adoption of key terms, an expl...
Leon Battista Alberti, 'On the Art of Building in Ten Books' Translated by Joseph Rykwert... more Leon Battista Alberti, 'On the Art of Building in Ten Books' Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavemor L. A. Zhadova (ed.), 'Tatlin' (Budapest 1984). English translation Helen Ross, 'Just For Living, Aboriginal Perceptions of Housing in North West Australia' Tony Fry, 'Design History Australia: A Source Text in Methods and Resources' Phillip Cox and David Moore, 'The Australian Functional Tradition' Lenore Coltheart and Don Fraser (eds.), 'Lamdmarks in Public Works, Engineers and Their Works in New South Wales 1884-1914' Peter Bridges and Don MacDonald, 'James Barnet, Colonial Architect' Don Watson and Judith McKay, 'A Directory of Queensland Architects to 1940' Russell Walden, 'Voices of Silence: New Zealand's Chapel of Futuna' Jeremy Salmond, 'Old New Zealand Houses 1800-1940' Victoria Middleton, 'The Legend of Green Valley' Dyranda Prevost and Ann Rado, 'Living Places...
The Journal of Architecture, Jul 4, 2017
This paper examines two axonometric projections by Gerrit Rietveld that portray the house designe... more This paper examines two axonometric projections by Gerrit Rietveld that portray the house designed for and in collaboration with Truus Schröder-Schräder.1 Utilising specific attributes of the technique of the axonometric, Rietveld developed concepts of architecture that were both abstract and yet contingent on architecture's material requirements and its function as habitation. Rather than using text to explain the ideas behind the house Rietveld chose drawing, and more specifically the technique of the axonometric, to characterise complex strategies that were fundamental to its distinctive architectural concepts.2 Axonometric techniques, in maintaining dimensional accuracy, can provide an understanding of architectural design that, unlike perspective or photography, avoids placing the viewer's experience as the privileged interpretive paradigm.3 For Rietveld, illustration clearly situated his expectations for architecture's signification beyond its physical presence. His exploration of architecture's potential through the axonometric could also have been influenced by his reaction to popular theories coming from ‘scientific’ explorations of perceptual space and to artists like Piet Mondrian who had criticised architecture for its inability to come to terms with ‘new representation’.4 These two Rietveld illustrations provoke specific understandings of architecture by privileging the abstract conceptual relationships that can be developed between spatial and auxiliary domestic elements of a dwelling. For the discipline of architecture, Rietveld provided an alternative concept for architecture based scientifically on a system of logical equivalency. For architecture this suggested a correlation formed between abstract geometries of form with the contingencies of material habitation.
Proceedings, SAHANZ Annual Conference, 2012
When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rie... more When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rietveld Schröder House (GA 68) it encapsulated the representation of an apparently unproblematic historical occurrence. Included, were drawings and photographs, contextualised through commentary by the curator of the Rietveld archive in Utrecht, Ida van Zijl. Gerrit Rietveld had been the exempla of "Dutch" and De Stijl characteristics of the modern since the completion of the Schröder House in 1924. By the mid-century, Rietveld's position in architectural history had been reinforced through the exhibition and publication of drawings and models in centres of artistic dominance like Venice, New York and his birthplace, the Netherlands. As with the Futagawa publication, these exhibitions and their catalogues were presented without referencing any issues that might be raised associated with their content. Yet, recent assertions by staff at the Rietveld Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, bring to light questions of attribution and provenance and a growing debate surrounding the use of specific illustrations. At issue is the provenance of the axonometric illustrations most commonly placed beside photographs of the Schröder House as evidence of a moment of synthesis in its design. While the complicated history of their provenance might seem of little concern to explaining Rietveld's architecture, recognition of the provenance of any art work brings with it historical questions including its contemporaneous setting with implications for possible influences, concepts of representation, and techniques of production. Changes in dates and locations of conception and completion significantly modify the relationship between the artefact, its content and the intellectual processes that influence its creation. Curators at the Rietveld archive have verbally asserted the date of the axonometric illustrations to be as late as 1951 and therefore conceptually questionable in its inclusion in new exhibitions of De Stijl during the mid-century. If this were true, Rietveld may have been in the process of reconstructing his own historical dominance in the De Stijl movement using the axonometric technique as representation of the concepts of the house.
The Journal of Architecture, 2014
Interstices: journal of architecture and related arts, Mar 15, 2013
Much attention in the last few years has been focused on environmental change, material waste, ec... more Much attention in the last few years has been focused on environmental change, material waste, economic disparity, and the rapid migration of industry. Planned obsolescence, disposability, biodegradation and similar progressive material processes can provide a new model for reconciling cultural desires for more with a sustainable mandate for less. Rather than viewing the design of the built environment as means to a single, complete "finished product", transformative material processes can be applied as opportunistic and systematic strategies for designed environments that can productively evolve over time. There is an abundance of underutilized built space in the world today, particularly in areas with shifting industrial and economic resources. As buildings in these areas are abandoned, recyclable materials are stripped from them leaving the bulk of the building material left unprotected and exposed to accelerated decay. Ultimately, the ability to recycle proportionately small amounts of the building material renders a large portion of the material unusable again, producing a huge amount of unnecessary waste. Because we design for a building's durability in terms of total assembly, we overlook opportunities to think of the built environment in terms of replaceable assemblies of varying durabilities. One useful model for a component-based way of designing is found with the widespread use of paper collars, cuffs and shirtfronts in men's fashion in the mid-19 th century. The restructuring of the shirt to provide for single disposable components lengthened the life of the body of the shirt and allowed for durability to adjust according to the use patterns inherent in particular areas of the shirt structure. By acknowledging a variation of needs for durability in this case and making something strategically and variably disposable, overall durability and functionality were extended with minimal waste. This presentation will examine new modes of material and spatial assembly in the built environment that embrace obsolescence, disposability and biodegradability and design for varying permanence in built environments that can accommodate modern migrations of industry, capital and population.
Interstices: journal of architecture and related arts, Mar 15, 2013
This article explores the first solo exhibition of the drawings and paintings created by Zaha Had... more This article explores the first solo exhibition of the drawings and paintings created by Zaha Hadid. It was held at the Luce Van Room Gallery, Amsterdam
Lund Humphries eBooks, 2019
When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rie... more When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rietveld Schröder House (GA 68) it encapsulated the representation of an apparently unproblematic historical occurrence. Included, were drawings and photographs, contextualised through commentary by the curator of the Rietveld archive in Utrecht, Ida van Zijl. Gerrit Rietveld had been the exempla of "Dutch" and De Stijl characteristics of the modern since the completion of the Schröder House in 1924. By the mid-century, Rietveld's position in architectural history had been reinforced through the exhibition and publication of drawings and models in centres of artistic dominance like Venice, New York and his birthplace, the Netherlands. As with the Futagawa publication, these exhibitions and their catalogues were presented without referencing any issues that might be raised associated with their content. Yet, recent assertions by staff at the Rietveld Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, bring to light questions of attribution and provenance and a growing debate surrounding the use of specific illustrations. At issue is the provenance of the axonometric illustrations most commonly placed beside photographs of the Schröder House as evidence of a moment of synthesis in its design. While the complicated history of their provenance might seem of little concern to explaining Rietveld's architecture, recognition of the provenance of any art work brings with it historical questions including its contemporaneous setting with implications for possible influences, concepts of representation, and techniques of production. Changes in dates and locations of conception and completion significantly modify the relationship between the artefact, its content and the intellectual processes that influence its creation. Curators at the Rietveld archive have verbally asserted the date of the axonometric illustrations to be as late as 1951 and therefore conceptually questionable in its inclusion in new exhibitions of De Stijl during the mid-century. If this were true, Rietveld may have been in the process of reconstructing his own historical dominance in the De Stijl movement using the axonometric technique as representation of the concepts of the house.
Architectural Theory Review, 2005
This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the... more This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the figure of the architect as constructs within historical notions of the social. By examining a single illustration, the frontispiece to Sebastiano Serlio's. II lerzo libro, the paper argues that the frontispiece portrays a correspondence between the technical conventions of the architect with the concepts and principles of the discipline. The frontispiece didactically states that the architect is able to fulfil the role implicit in ‘Nature.’ to transform the ‘licentiousness’ of antique architecture through reason and judgment, and through this transformation bring ideals of decorum lo concepts of the social through architecture. The paper shows thai for late Renaissance Italy, the architect is represented as intellectually autonomous from, while dependent on. structures of governmentality and patronage for the formation of the discipline. This formulation enabled the architect to represent the social through architecture's resolution of the competing circumstances of the city.1
The Journal of Architecture, 2020
The sketch has long occupied a privileged position in architecture as the conceptual origin of a ... more The sketch has long occupied a privileged position in architecture as the conceptual origin of a realised building. However, this privilege is also problematic, as it obscures the greater intellectual basis of the sketch. This contributes to architecture’s disciplinary development and experimentation. Analysing one sketch drawn by Zaha Hadid in the process of designing the MAXXI in Rome, this article aims to offer ways to reconsider the role of the sketch. Two analyses are carried out to unravel the greater significance of the sketch in architecture. The first relies on the ideational function of the line in architectural practice, as proposed by Andrew Benjamin. The second studies the line in relation to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘smooth space’. These writings on the role of the line form an important basis that questions the nature of abstraction in the sketch. Taken together, these two analyses and Hadid’s earlier explorations of architectural space generate alternative meanings to the lines of her sketch for the MAXXI. Finally, the article questions the figure of the architect in relation to their own sketches. I argue that it is often the architect who redefines how sketches are interpreted over time, and find their place in a specific teleology of development. In conclusion, the sketch is a complex fragment in the realisation of a building. It has broad experimental implications for the discipline.
Architectural Theory Review, 1996
Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatise of the Renaissance. They rep... more Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatise of the Renaissance. They represent disciplinary boundaries, aspirations and disputes in their graphic content. In addition, they place these internal concerns in the broader context of the political, aesthetic and technical concerns of their time tracing the architect's role in this process.
This study investigates the changing understanding of the role of the ‘architect ’ in Italy durin... more This study investigates the changing understanding of the role of the ‘architect ’ in Italy during the sixteenth century by examining frontispieces to published architectural treatises. From analysis of these illustrations four attributes emerge as important to new societal understandings of the role of ‘architect. ’ The first attribute is the desire to delineate the boundaries of knowledge for architecture as a discipline, relevant to sixteenth-century society. The second is the depiction of the ‘architect, ’ as an intellectual engaged in the resolution of practical, political, economic and philosophical considerations of his practice. The third represents the ‘architect ’ having a specific domain of activity in the design of civic spaces of magnificence not only for patrons but also for the city per se. The fourth represents the ‘architect ’ and society as perceiving a commonality of an architectural role beyond the boundary of individual locations and patrons. Five treatises meet...
Fabrications: the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 1989
Volume 1 of 'Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia ... more Volume 1 of 'Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand' (Including cover).
Fabrications: the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 1989
Publication information, Table of Contents, forward by Judith Brine, editorial by Desley Luscombe
Many Renaissance treatises on architecture included an allegorical frontispiece that portrayed bo... more Many Renaissance treatises on architecture included an allegorical frontispiece that portrayed both the discipline and the purveyor of architecture as having attributes that were social, ethical and moral in purpose. While Alberti in his De re aedifi catoria reinforced the importance of virtus for citizenry, these illustrations join the concept of virtus with that of disegno in the architect’s attributes.1 Allegorical frontispieces took an understanding of the architect beyond the role of designer of buildings. As a model citizen with responsibility for the visual representations of a governed society, he was represented as capable of forming architectural space and imagery, designed and organised by a programme of invenzione that inscribed political intent able to be read in the context of the court.2 Biographical texts, written in the same period, emulated the representation of the architect in the allegorical illustrations and presented, through the adoption of key terms, an expl...
Leon Battista Alberti, 'On the Art of Building in Ten Books' Translated by Joseph Rykwert... more Leon Battista Alberti, 'On the Art of Building in Ten Books' Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavemor L. A. Zhadova (ed.), 'Tatlin' (Budapest 1984). English translation Helen Ross, 'Just For Living, Aboriginal Perceptions of Housing in North West Australia' Tony Fry, 'Design History Australia: A Source Text in Methods and Resources' Phillip Cox and David Moore, 'The Australian Functional Tradition' Lenore Coltheart and Don Fraser (eds.), 'Lamdmarks in Public Works, Engineers and Their Works in New South Wales 1884-1914' Peter Bridges and Don MacDonald, 'James Barnet, Colonial Architect' Don Watson and Judith McKay, 'A Directory of Queensland Architects to 1940' Russell Walden, 'Voices of Silence: New Zealand's Chapel of Futuna' Jeremy Salmond, 'Old New Zealand Houses 1800-1940' Victoria Middleton, 'The Legend of Green Valley' Dyranda Prevost and Ann Rado, 'Living Places...
The Journal of Architecture, Jul 4, 2017
This paper examines two axonometric projections by Gerrit Rietveld that portray the house designe... more This paper examines two axonometric projections by Gerrit Rietveld that portray the house designed for and in collaboration with Truus Schröder-Schräder.1 Utilising specific attributes of the technique of the axonometric, Rietveld developed concepts of architecture that were both abstract and yet contingent on architecture's material requirements and its function as habitation. Rather than using text to explain the ideas behind the house Rietveld chose drawing, and more specifically the technique of the axonometric, to characterise complex strategies that were fundamental to its distinctive architectural concepts.2 Axonometric techniques, in maintaining dimensional accuracy, can provide an understanding of architectural design that, unlike perspective or photography, avoids placing the viewer's experience as the privileged interpretive paradigm.3 For Rietveld, illustration clearly situated his expectations for architecture's signification beyond its physical presence. His exploration of architecture's potential through the axonometric could also have been influenced by his reaction to popular theories coming from ‘scientific’ explorations of perceptual space and to artists like Piet Mondrian who had criticised architecture for its inability to come to terms with ‘new representation’.4 These two Rietveld illustrations provoke specific understandings of architecture by privileging the abstract conceptual relationships that can be developed between spatial and auxiliary domestic elements of a dwelling. For the discipline of architecture, Rietveld provided an alternative concept for architecture based scientifically on a system of logical equivalency. For architecture this suggested a correlation formed between abstract geometries of form with the contingencies of material habitation.
Proceedings, SAHANZ Annual Conference, 2012
When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rie... more When, in 1992 Yukio Futagawa published the Japanese journal series Global Architecture on the Rietveld Schröder House (GA 68) it encapsulated the representation of an apparently unproblematic historical occurrence. Included, were drawings and photographs, contextualised through commentary by the curator of the Rietveld archive in Utrecht, Ida van Zijl. Gerrit Rietveld had been the exempla of "Dutch" and De Stijl characteristics of the modern since the completion of the Schröder House in 1924. By the mid-century, Rietveld's position in architectural history had been reinforced through the exhibition and publication of drawings and models in centres of artistic dominance like Venice, New York and his birthplace, the Netherlands. As with the Futagawa publication, these exhibitions and their catalogues were presented without referencing any issues that might be raised associated with their content. Yet, recent assertions by staff at the Rietveld Archive, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, bring to light questions of attribution and provenance and a growing debate surrounding the use of specific illustrations. At issue is the provenance of the axonometric illustrations most commonly placed beside photographs of the Schröder House as evidence of a moment of synthesis in its design. While the complicated history of their provenance might seem of little concern to explaining Rietveld's architecture, recognition of the provenance of any art work brings with it historical questions including its contemporaneous setting with implications for possible influences, concepts of representation, and techniques of production. Changes in dates and locations of conception and completion significantly modify the relationship between the artefact, its content and the intellectual processes that influence its creation. Curators at the Rietveld archive have verbally asserted the date of the axonometric illustrations to be as late as 1951 and therefore conceptually questionable in its inclusion in new exhibitions of De Stijl during the mid-century. If this were true, Rietveld may have been in the process of reconstructing his own historical dominance in the De Stijl movement using the axonometric technique as representation of the concepts of the house.
The Journal of Architecture, 2014
Zaha Hadid's Paintings, Imagining Architecture, 2024
Pleased to announce the release of my new book published by Lund Humphries, to be launched in Lon... more Pleased to announce the release of my new book published by Lund Humphries, to be launched in London at the Zaha Hadid Foundation 3rd October 2024. For pre-order information please see https://www.lundhumphries.com/collections/coming-soon/products/zaha-hadids-paintings?mc_cid=55c3b1174c&mc_eid=f309ec8184
Within this book, each chapter focuses on individual paintings from Hadid’s repertoire, revealing their visual logic and questioning the complexity of their architectural propositions. Analysis raises questions of the purpose of painting in architectural representation. The paintings are well known through numerous exhibitions and publications and have been seen many times – yet not really ‘seen’ as the subject for a broad-based critical analysis. Readers of this book may have understood them as a form of branding, but perhaps will have rarely questioned the context or the complex layering of their visual imagery – and how they illustrate theoretical concerns within the architectural debates of the period. This book aims to slow down and look more closely at the selected images. It directs readers to see elements within each composition as connected, unifying the visually complex spatial logic of a radical architecture. Uniquely it is the techniques of painting’s pictorial space that have underpinned Hadid’s exploration of the potentials of architecture’s space, form and time relationships.
The Salon (1912-1917) Studies and Indexes., 1996
The Salon was the title given to the journal of the Royal Institute of Australian Architects duri... more The Salon was the title given to the journal of the Royal Institute of Australian Architects during 1912-1917. This is one of two chapters that accompany this index of Names and Buildings held within the journal.
This chapter examined the illustrative content of the journal, its representation of architecture and the profession's role in recognising a unique quality in Australia and its architecture. Notions of nationhood, domesticity and professionalism prevail.
This Thing Called Theory, 2017
This paper explores the apprehension of meaning in architectural drawing afforded through each dr... more This paper explores the apprehension of meaning in architectural drawing afforded through each drawing's structuring 'diagram'. Rather than being confi ned to technique alone, the 'diagram' of an architectural drawing helps to inform its delivery of visual meaning. Through their diagram, architectural drawings, and more specifi cally presentation drawings, anticipate a response to the theoretical proposition of the architecture portrayed. In this manner, and in order to deliver meaning beyond technical representation, architectural drawings can anticipate a role for a viewing subject that frames the bodily interaction between viewer and viewed image.
Architecture Through Drawing, 2019
Architecture Through Drawing, 2019
An architect’s design sketches are rarely questioned for their implementation of technical drawin... more An architect’s design sketches are rarely questioned for their implementation of technical drawing conventions commonly used in the profession. However, these sketches are most often characterised in some way by perspective, axonometry or orthography. These techniques define certain ways of thinking about architecture. This essay will examine the importance of drawing technique on the development of design ideas in the sketch. Through an investigation of a single sketch, one by Mies van der Rohe, titled ‘Hofhauser’ (Court Houses) completed in c. 1935 it questions the purpose of framing architectural ideas through perspectival techniques. What these techniques offer is the capacity for the sketch to reinforce architecture’s ordered regularity, an attribute that for Mies supported a specific notion of spatial and material value. In his sketch, perspectival conventions equally reflect a desire initially for this value to be recognised by the viewer as imbued with moral inferences and as a consequence, the expectation of this precondition within potential dwellers of his architecture.
Architectural Theory Review, 2005
This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the... more This paper questions what at any time is used to represent the discipline of architecture and the figure of the architect as constructs within historical notions of the social. By examining a single illustration, the frontispiece to Sebastiano Serlio's. II lerzo libro, the paper argues that the frontispiece portrays a correspondence between the technical conventions of the architect with the concepts and principles of the discipline. The frontispiece didactically states that the architect is able to fulfil the role implicit in 'Nature.' to transform the 'licentiousness' of antique architecture through reason and judgment, and through this transformation bring ideals of decorum lo concepts of the social through architecture. The paper shows thai for late Renaissance Italy, the architect is represented as intellectually autonomous from, while dependent on. structures of governmentality and patronage for the formation of the discipline. This formulation enabled the architect to represent the social through architecture's resolution of the competing circumstances of the city.
Architectural Theory Review, 1996
Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatises of the Renaissance. They re... more Frontispieces are neglected components of the architectural treatises of the Renaissance. They represent disciplinary boundaries, aspirations and disputes in their graphic content. In addition they place these internal concerns in the broader context of the political, aesthetic and technical concerns of their time and trace the architect's role in these processes, and the emergence of the named architect as a figure of authority. The paper argues for a historicist reading of the frontispiece to determine these influences and connections, and a reappreciation of the political content of the 'neutral' graphic language of antique classicism, of visual rhetoric in general, and the use of history, and other generators of authority in these drawings.