The World Architecture Festival and Prize, together with co-curators Make Architects and Sir John Soane’s Museum, have announced Filipino Architect and Illustrator Eldry John Infante as the Overall Winner of the 2023 Architecture Drawing Prize. The awarded drawing, titled ‘(Re)membering the See Monster,’ is a mixed-media representation of a defunct oil platform. The image aims to invite conversations on the topic of reuse, going beyond the structure’s physicality.
As another year draws to a close, ArchDaily's team of curators is pleased to present a selection of the best architectural drawings published throughout 2023, without which the projects' appreciation would certainly not be the same.
Architectural representation plays a fundamental role both in the design process - from the very first sketches to the finest construction details - and in its presentation to a wider audience. Thus, during the selection process, we were able to see a rich and varied set of designs that were part of the more than 4,000 project publications this year. We had the difficult task of coming up with the most representative and inspiring ones amongst them.
One of Paulo Mendes da Rocha's main design gestures in the Pinacoteca renovation project was to create a new longitudinal axis for circulation, moving its entrance to the south face of the building. Metallic walkways, which cross internal courtyards covered by skylights, enable new dynamics of circulation between the rooms, transforming a neoclassical building into a museum with a contemporary program.
The ability to completely renovate a space by demolishing parts, making additions, altering functionality, and improving ambience is one of the most admired functions of the architect. In housing, this significance is even more apparent, since adapting housing to contemporary demands, through a well-thought-out plan, can drastically improve the quality of life of the occupants.
In architecture, choosing the right construction materials is crucial to improve efficiency, ensure structural integrity and maximize performance, ultimately setting the standard for the finished product. But because any building – from its outer skin to its framing system – consists of many layers and parts, understanding how these fit and work can be just as important during design and manufacture. Technical specification of materials and constructive systems plays a key role in conveying this information, providing all of the necessary knowledge, properties and characteristics for any successful project. After all, the more you know about what lies between walls and behind finishes, the better your architecture will be.
The roof is one of the most essential structural elements of nearly every construction. It is the element that allows a delineated space to transform into one that feels protected. Strongly related to the climatic conditions of the context, the roof's variations in aesthetic and structural design have allowed architects to indulge their stylistic preoccupations to convert roofs not only into elements of closure and climate protection but into a character-giving feature that lends identity and flair – especially when the roof becomes a wall.
Following this opportunity, we want to highlight great examples of roofs that also become walls: 13 houses in which the roof completes the façade, delineating not only the interior in its vertical sense but also in the horizontal one.
Nieuwe Instituut has appointed Jan Jongert / Superuse Studios from Rotterdam as curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. In response to Lesley Lokko’s overarching theme for this edition of the Biennale, “Laboratory of the Future,” the Dutch curatorial team aims to explore the complex systems that underpin the structures of our societies. The exhibition will be open from 20 May to 26 November 2023.
The Overall Winner of the 2022 Architecture Drawing Prize was announced today by the World Architecture Festival and Prize co-curators Make Architects and Sir John Soane’s Museum.
The winner is a hybrid drawing entitled “Fitzroy Food Institute” by Samuel Wen and Michael Ren, combining different rendering techniques.
Every year, ArchDaily honors the best architectural drawings of the year in an annual tradition that has now been going on for eight years. The 2022 edition is particularly special, as it showcases a wide range of techniques and representations in the field of architecture. From traditional painting to digital collages and axonometric drawings, this year's selection truly has something for everyone.
In recent years hair salons and barbershops have begun to incorporate different activities - a programmatic hybridization almost necessary in today's service economy.
Several architects have been commissioned to propose alternatives to the standard beauty salon/barbershop to not only address an efficient configuration but stunning interior aesthetics.
Take a look at 10 barbershops and beauty salons with their plan and section.
Entries to the annual Architecture Drawing Prize are judged in three categories, hand-drawn, digital and hybrid. Last year, Dafni Filippa, a post-graduate student studying for a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture (MLA) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, won in the hybrid category and was also judged overall winner of the Prize with her Flood-responsive landscape performance, a virtuoso drawing created through a variety of rendering and modelling techniques produced by hand, in plaster and through and across multiple software platforms.
In 2016, Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena announced that his firm, ELEMENTAL, had released the rights to four of their social housing projects, and all documents would be uploaded to their website for public use. Aravena’s goal was to start a movement in which architects would work together to tackle the world’s challenges around housing shortages and affordability, especially with increased migration. The shared drawing sets and a description of the project’s principles provide architects with the necessary documentation for building a low-cost home, encouraging designers to do the same with their work, contractors to assist in building these homes, and governments to shift their thinking of how they can approach mass urbanization. Six years later, how has the concept of open-source architecture progressed, and how has it impacted the architectural profession ever since?
There’s the iconic Cenotaph for Newton drawing, the evocative monochrome illustration by Etienne-Louis Boullée. There are the experimental drawings of Lebbeus Woods, evocative urban visions of a distant future. There are also the well-known drawings of Le Corbusier’s utopian Ville Radieuse. Drawing, and in turn architectural visualizations, have always been a useful medium with which to contemplate architectural concepts of the future. It is fascinating to look back at the architectural visualizations of the future done in the past.
‘’The delight I get out of doing buildings is to say: Screw you, it can be built’’ says Architect Peter Cook in conversation with Louisiana Channel, where he discusses his determination to communicate ideas through vivid Architectural drawings and the skepticism he has faced in regards to his ambitious design proposals and their outlandish appearance.
Peter Cook was interviewed at his studio in January 2022 prior to his exhibition ‘City Landscapes’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. As the first artwork displayed that has been produced by an Architect, it explores his reverence for hand-drawing as an Architect's primary medium. The work depicts innovative new ways of exploring the city and our physical space in striking and evocative texture and color.
ArchDaily continues a seven-year-long tradition of celebrating the best architecture drawings of the year. From painting to collages to blueprints, the 2021 edition highlights a carefully-curated collection of architectural drawings and visualizations with a wide variety of techniques and representations.
Sergei Tchoban (b. 1962, Saint Petersburg, Russia) graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1986. He started his practicing career in Russia but left for Germany in 1991, becoming a managing partner of nps tchoban voss in Berlin in 1995. Since 2006, he also heads SPEECH, one of the leading architectural offices in Moscow. Apart from building his successful career of a practicing architect, he is a collector of architectural drawings, publisher, and museum owner.
This short essay, written by the author and critic Jonathan Glancey, coincides with the launch of the inaugural Architecture Drawing Prize – a competition curated by the World Architecture Festival, the Sir John Soane's Museum, and Make. The deadline for the award is the 17th of September 2021.
“Is graphicacy a word?” asks Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects and instigator of The Architecture Drawing Prize. It is. “Like literacy”, he says, “, it’s certainly what I’m interested in when looking at and judging drawings. It’s about a fluency in making and understanding them.” The Architecture Drawing Prize is in its fifth year now. “We tend to see very few hand drawings by young architects - they mostly use computers - and, today, most architectural students come from more of a maths and physics than an art background. I still believe, though, that hand drawing is very important.”
