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Susana Torre is an Argentine-born architect who has worked primarily in the United States, where she studied at Columbia University and later chose to settle. Her relocation coincided with the onset of Argentina’s Dirty War, a period of state terrorism during which the military dictatorship carried out a systematic campaign of repression against those it identified as political opponents.

Her practice spans a wide range of scales and formats, including built work, from interiors to urban plans, as well as theoretical writing, exhibitions, and a sustained career as a lecturer and educator. Throughout her work, she has consistently engaged with feminist culture and practice, examining how a progressive role of women in society can be expressed and encouraged through architecture.

Her 1970–1972 project, House of Meanings, is a theoretical proposal that was later partially translated into two specific projects. A central concern throughout Torre’s practice is “the tension between the ‘completeness’ of objects and the ‘incompleteness’ of design as a process”, the built form and the indeterminate and open-ended process of dwelling and constructing a community which evolves over time. This dialectic is clearly articulated in the House of Meanings, conceived as an open-ended matrix of parallel walls that can be incrementally completed at multiple levels through the addition of modules, a three-dimensional square grid presented as three to four metres but which could take different dimensions once applied to a specific context. The project proposes a form of inhabitation that accommodates change, allowing for mutable states of dwelling over time. The open matrix resists rigid distinctions between oppositional conditions such as open and closed, or public and private. Instead, it enables the emergence of interconnected systems of shared spaces alongside more enclosed, intimate modules, allowing for a crossing of the house in multiple directions. In doing so, through the presence of mobile partitions and the possibility of adding modules over time, it allows for the growth, evolution, and transformation of living environments in response to the shifting patterns of individual and collective life over time.

Torre’s project acts as a designed critique, through what she calls the principle of space as matrix, of several housing models starting from functionalist domestic layouts, in which the size, position, and designation of rooms often encode implicit hierarchies among inhabitants. At the same time, she critiques the modern open plan, noting that, in her words, “power and submission often become the means to resolve priorities in competing uses.” Furtherly, she questions the Beecher’s house prototype which furthered the idea that women should take care of the house and act in isolation, while providing for the family more efficiently. 

The House of Meanings thus operates as a system that sustains spatial continuity while still allowing for differentiated degrees of privacy and hierarchy. It further challenges the assumptions of strict functionalism, where to each room is assigned a single, fixed use, by proposing instead inherently multifunctional spaces. In this sense, the project also critiques suburban zoning regulations, which rigidly separate functions and, in doing so, contribute to forms of social isolation by treating housing as a segregating device rather than a connective one. Denying the presence of distribution areas such as corridors or entrances—which historically emerged to accommodate multiple circulation paths within the house due to the presence of servants—it also erases the hierarchy between spaces for movement and spaces for dwelling within the home.

Two projects for private clients, most of them women (a writer who is often visited for extended periods by friends and her two adult children, and an extended family consisting of a couple and the wife’s mother and sister), allowed Torre to move from the theoretical project to a realistic, though as yet unbuilt, house and to a built one: the first located in Puerto Rico and the second in Santo Domingo. These two projects were intended to move beyond the model of the single-family house, becoming instead an expanded system capable of accommodating extended family, friends, and even an additional household at times, thus merging the private dwelling with an evolving structure able to progressively host a small community.

Further Reading:

Susana Torre, “Space As Matrix,” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics, Vol. 3, No. 3, Issue 11, 1981.

Karen A. Franck, “A Feminist Approach to Architecture,” in Ellen Perry Berkeley, ed. Architecture, A Place for Women, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press 1989.

Camyl Vigneault, “Room for Women. An Atlas of Feminist Housing Projects from the 1980s” on Burning Farm.

All images © and courtesy of Susana Torre

Felipe Bedoya is an artist from Bogotá, Colombia. He employs a personal visual language akin to drawing, in which photography is deconstructed as a medium by isolating and selecting fragments to build new narratives. 

Often, he uses a grid, like graph paper, to organise images of people and objects. He starts from photographs and then redraws and rearranges them, placing each person within a separate square. In this way, he shows how individuals can share the same space while remaining distinct and isolated. Through this technique, he reflects on his idea of home as “an island constructed from fragments that hold memory, shelter solitude, and where the artist’s origin always resides as an aesthetic reference.” 

The images from the series 1 × Uno function as figurative diagrams in which the grid provides the basic order of an entire universe and where diverse themes are explored through repetition, patterns, isolation, division, and grouping of elements.

All images: Ⓒ Felipe Bedoya. More on Behance.

Heidi Linck is a multimedia artist based in the Netherlands. Her work explores the poetic dimension of neglected spaces and their capacity to convey a sense of loss while opening up potential forms of imagination. The encounter between collective and individual memory is expressed in both her works on paper and her photographs of models: the dark tones of her gouaches echo the somber atmosphere in which her sculptural objects are immersed.

Her series Pounding Shadows depicts corners of abandoned everyday sites resting in diffuse obscurity. The models do not explicitly reveal their original subjects, leaving the task of reconstruction to the viewer, who can recognise or imagine fragments of pools, clad walls, sections of construction sites, or forgotten corners of unidentified buildings, remnants of previous lives or traces retraceable within one’s own past. In these silent environments, coloured clues and patterns open up the possibility of rebirth, a glimpse of future openings and the potential transformation of the derelict corner into a new, inhabitable space.

Heidi Linck’s drawings explore multiple variations of black through different techniques, from acrylic graphite paint to lamp black gouache and jet-black pigment. They depict material patterns, silhouettes, and shadows of similarly forgotten places, which the artist inhabits through her imagination, mentally exploring, transforming, and progressively translating them onto paper. Both the photographs of models and the drawings convey a sense of suspension that places the observer in an uneasy zone, while allowing the mind to wander into uncharted territory, rich with unexpressed potential.

My own palace 1

My own palace 2

Pounding Shadow 1

Pounding Shadow 7

Pounding Shadow 11

Renarrated Space 7

Interior 13

Interior 17

Performative Silence 1

All works © and courtesy of Heidi Linck.

Hans Vredeman de Vries (1527 – c. 1607) was a Renaissance architect from the Netherlands, best known for his printed works. In 1604, he published his most renowned tome, which offers a rich visual exploration of the possibilities of linear perspective in the depiction of architectural space, drawing inspiration from Serlio’s Seven Books of Architecture. The book, titled simply Perspective, is richly illustrated with various architectural scenes that both demonstrate the functioning of perspective in various spatial configurations and highlight the visual grids organising the images, including sight lines and vanishing points. The early plates depict abstract spatial arrangements, and as the pages progress, they gradually increase in complexity and figuration, eventually presenting a wide range of interior and exterior scenes. In some plates, the layering of architectural volumes, staircases, openings, and occasional human figures within geometric patterns gives rise to involuntarily surreal compositions. The opening pages include a description of each plate.

The ghorfas (in arab غرفة [ghurfa], meaning “room”) are common granary chambers found mostly in southern Tunisia and certain areas of Libya and associated with Berber populations. In more recent times, they have also been used as dwellings. They consist of barrel-vaulted rooms measuring 4 to 5 metres in length and 2 metres in height, each with a single central door. They are usually stacked on top of one another and neatly arranged side by side, sometimes forming a common courtyard. They were generally built in the 14th century.

On the ground floor, the ghorfas sometimes housed caretakers along with animals such as camels, donkeys, or mules, while steep exterior stairs provided access to up to four levels of ghorfas used for storing food like cereals, dates, or animal products. Their large number is linked to the risk of extremely dry seasons. A single opening on each façade ensures ventilation.

The construction technique, without wooden beams or formwork, is due to the scarcity of large quantities of construction wood in the area. For each ghorfa, two walls are built two metres apart, and sacks filled with sand are stacked to shape the future vault. These are then covered with a mat, onto which a layer of clay is spread. Once the plaster vault is dry, the sacks are removed. The vaulted rooms allow for the stacking of multiple stories without the need for timber for the floors. Furthermore, they are most efficiently used in continuous series, where the lateral thrusts of the vaults counterbalance each other, making it possible to reduce the wall thickness, with each wall serving as support for two adjoining vaults.

A ksar, a fortified Berber village, typically contained around 200 ghorfas. Their massive presence also served a defensive function, with the blind wall facing outward.

The most famous group of ghorfas was in Medenine, where a complex of 25 courtyards with over 6,000 ghorfas formed the city itself. They were built by groups of nomads to better sustain their lifestyle until their destruction in 1962 to make way for a new urban plan. Today, only two courtyards remain.

Ksar Ouled Soltane  Panegyrics of Granovetter / CC BY-SA 2.0 via Atlas Obscura

© Jose Mario Pires / CC BY-SA 3.0

Further reading: E.B., “Ghorfa”, Encyclopédie berbère [Online], 20 | 1998, document G45, Online since 01 June 2011, connection on 27 March 2025. http://journals.openedition.org/encyclopedieberbere/1924

Marine Beaufils is a French embroidery artist whose meticulous work draws on the analogy between pixels and needlepoints, as she translates scenes from her favorite video games, movies, or scientific imagery from screen to embroidery canvas. This process freezes a fragment of a larger narrative, converting backlit scenes into a familiar medium that evokes a homey feeling and a vintage aura. The embroidered scenes thus bear an ambiguous quality as they appear suspended between a technological medium and an artisanal practice.

In 2022, she began work on La Sentinelle, a series of 14 pieces measuring 55×46 cm, completed in February 2024. Each needlepoint depicts a scene from the video game The Sentinel, created by Geoff Crammond in 1986, and is illuminated in two colors chosen from the game’s original eight-shade palette.
Marine Beaufils describes her creative process as unfolding in two steps. The first step, dreaming, involves closing her eyes to recall scenes from video games— The Sentinel but also Metroid and Maniac Mansion—that sparked her sense of wonder. She remembers the strangeness of crossing these surreal landscapes and then seeks out the original media, whether cartridges or floppy disks. The second step, transcription, is where she translates these scenes onto an embroidery grid. She starts by counting the pixels in width and height, then arranging them on the new grid, initially drawing them in black and white before assigning colors. Once everything is precisely mapped, the meticulous needlepoint work begins.

The resulting images evoke a deep nostalgia and sense of wonder, ranging from abstract patterns to surreal landscapes that originated on screen and have landed on the canvas.

All images © Marine Beaufils.

Giuseppe Pagano was a central figure in Italian architecture of the first part of the 20th century. Along with his practice as a rationalist architect and his political engagement, which led him to leave the Fascist Party, join the Resistance, and later be deported to Mauthausen, he devoted part of his life to documenting Italian rural architecture through the lens of his Rolleiflex.

In 1936, together with Guarniero Daniel, he curated the exhibition “Architettura Rurale Italiana” for the VI Milan Triennale exhibition, where he showcased a series of his pictures of Italian rural houses presented in grids of three by four and three by two in the catalogue. He documented various rural types found in different Italian regions to support his theory that rational architecture originated from vernacular architecture. A series of pictures exhibited about rural architecture in other countries were taken by other photographers and selected by Pagano and Daniel; they illustrated how the theory could be extended to other places.

In his research, Pagano identified the origin of vernacular architecture in the haystack, which was later covered with a simple conical roof to protect it from the rain. As the necessity shifted from protecting hay to protecting humans, the archetype of the primitive hut emerged, and from it, the types of rural houses developed. Progressively, there was an evolution from the original conical form of the primitive roof due to adapting this simple form to varying environmental contexts and the availability of local materials.

The exhibition and its catalogue identify the variations and additions to the original archetype and underline how every architectural choice is directly connected to a practical need, thus revealing the functional nature of rural architecture. The chimney, the external stairs, and a progressively flatter roof all appear in response to new material necessities connected to the need for protection from the elements and the need to preserve food, while the round plan progressively evolves into a square plan.

Each type is documented with a set of square pictures taken by Pagano and sometimes associated with a simple plan or section. The grid of pictures is completed by a simple phrase describing the need that led to the evolution in the architectural solutions. Pagano’s pictures do not follow a precise protocol but describe the rural houses through a multiplicity of points of view, each time focusing on a specific aspect.

While the photographic practice lacks formal rigor and precision, Pagano’s panels at the Triennale might be seen as a precedent to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological exploration of industrial artifacts. This is evident in their grid organization, interest in anonymous architecture, and constant exploration of the same subject through different exemples.

Further reading: The exhibition’s catalogue

George Wylesol is a Baltimore-based artist who primarily produces illustrations and comic-like sequences of drawings, often accompanied by written text in the form of short poems. His works blend mundane objects and settings with surreal plots and visual associations, resulting in poetic yet slightly disturbing scenarios. The meticulous attention to everyday objects translates into a celebration of found artefacts, revealing glimpses of past lives and obsolete technologies, abandoned houses, and empty corridors, sparsely populated by uncanny human figures.

The sequences and comics celebrate a world of fragments drawn from the contemporary visual universe, where internet windows, advertisements, fancy packaging, and soulless spaces constantly superimpose, creating an endless interplay of different visual codes that Wylesol fearlessly confronts. The alternating use of different techniques—riso printing, photocopies, handmade drawings, digital sketching—further amplifies this sensation of collage borrowed from the contemporary visual landscape. This landscape is dominated by a superposition of languages, necessitating a multiplicity of media and codes to be portrayed, inspiring a surrealistic reading of reality.

All images © George Wylesol, courtesy of the artist.

Auguste Merle was an Art Brut artist living in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. His works depict imaginary buildings with meticulous detailing, using graphite on notebook paper.

The rigorous yet inventive forms are depicted in 90-degree axonometric projections, resonating with the paintings of Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, with the architectural drawings of John Hejduk, and more recently, with the ones in San Rocco Magazine. These drawings are selected from the wonderful site of the “Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne“.

All rights reserved © crédit photographique Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

A cloud atlas is a visual depiction of various types of clouds accompanied by their classification and nomenclature. Cloud atlases were primarily developed starting in the 19th century and utilised for training weather forecasters and meteorologists.

The 1930’s International Atlas of Clouds and of States of the Sky by the Office National Météorologique based in Paris provides a detailed textual description of different kinds of clouds, their shapes, the occurrences of the clouds, their behaviour, and a description of the disturbances the clouds indicate.

It is complemented by a series of plates where photographs capture various clouds and are paired with drawings that schematize the clouds in the picture and add a graphical description of their movements. A brief text describes the shapes and behaviours of the clouds, sometimes resulting in unintentional poems composed of scientific descriptions in dialogue with the images.

The sun still shows fairly definitely and the cloud is not therefore nimbostratus; but one can no longer distinguish the sun’s outline, and there are no halo phenomena.

Between them are interstices where the blue sky appears. Although some parts of the layer are rather heavily shaded, its thickness is medium and fairly uniform.

The clouds are advancing towards the observer, and the sky will become more overcast and thus there will be in time an increase of cloudiness.

The small drawings, while diagrammatic, have an interesting visual quality which also could remind us of short concrete poems or contemporary abstract illustration.

Here follows a selection of illustrated pages from the aforementioned edition.

Contemporary Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst works on abstract paintings characterized by bold patterns and colors. Most of the time, the shapes he depicts are not purely the result of chosen arrangements but act as a sort of “found art”: they are extracted from existing signs, advertisements, commercial signage, graphic decorations on trucks, billboards, and streets. These shapes silently inhabit our urban environment, possessing inherent graphical qualities, yet often going unnoticed as backgrounds to typographical signage and commercial messages. Biltereyst selects, isolates, and captures pictures of existing patterns that catch his eye during his day-to-day wanderings. He then carefully paints compositions inspired by his findings, mostly on small canvases. The rough quality of the painting is intended to break away from the pure language of abstraction, making reference to the urban world with its imperfections and grittiness.

Images © Alain Biltereyst, courtesy of the artist.

After last week’s post on Man Ray’s photographs of equation models from the Institut Poincaré in Paris, here are four illustrations (plus the cover) from the book “Verzeichnis von H. Wieners und P. Treutleins Sammlungen mathematischer Modelle für Hochschulen, höhere Lehranstalten und technische Fachschulen.”

Herman Wiener was a 19th-century German mathematician who created chalk and silk thread models with metallic frames.

The catalog of his work, printed in 1912, can be found online here.

The collection of 19th-century three-dimensional models of algebraic and differential equations at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris made a great impression on Surrealist artists. Allegedly, after Max Ernst brought these wood, metal, wire, and plaster forms to Man Ray’s attention, he was so impressed that he decided to photograph them.

In the thirty-one photographs, taken between 1934 and 1936, the objects are portrayed in dramatic black and white, decontextualized, without a recognizable background, and tightly cropped within the frame. Twelve of these photos first appeared in several issues of the revue “Les Cahiers d’art” in 1936 (N°1-2, year 11th) to illustrate Christian Zervos’ article on mathematics and abstraction (“Mathématiques et art abstrait”) and another by André Breton on the status of the object (“Crise de l’objet”). It goes without saying that Man Ray wasn’t really interested in the mathematical properties of the forms, nor in the practice of abstraction. The photographs enhance the tactile and anthropomorphic nature of the forms. Yet, devoid of any illustrative intention, they appear as an investigation into photography itself—a reflection on its means of formalization.

“The formulas accompanying them meant nothing to me, but the forms themselves were as varied and authentic as any in nature. The fact that they were man-made was of added importance to me and they could not be considered abstract as Breton feared when I first showed them to him – all abstract art appeared to me as fragments: enlargements of details in nature and art, whereas these objects were complete microcosms.” — Man Ray, quote from his autobiography, “Self Portrait.”

The works were displayed at an exhibition of Surrealist art at the New Burlington Gallery in London in 1936 and at ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,’ organized by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936–37. Interestingly, between 1935 and 1948, the artist created a small album in which he mounted the contact prints, showing cropping lines, writing titles from Shakespeare’s works, and reproducing mathematical notations and other indications of various natures.

The photos and the forms remained an important preoccupation for Man Ray throughout the years: in 1948, the photos were reinterpreted in the series of paintings titled The Shakespearean Equations, which the artist created after fleeing France during the Nazi occupation, taking the photographs with him.

Further reading:

Éric Brunier, “Une autre logique. Sur les Objets mathématiques de Man Ray“.

Kirsten A. Hoving, “Abstract Vision and satisfied passion: Man Ray’s mathematical objects“.

The online archive of the United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey is a valuable resource filled with detailed three-dimensional territorial maps employing various representational techniques.

Thanks to the work of artist, designer, and developer Jill Hubleys and their dedicated ‘X’ page, we’ve uncovered numerous isometric diagrams. Handpicked here, are a selection of them, including categories such as “Isometric Fence Diagrams”, “Isometric Cross-Section Diagrams”, and “Isometric Block Diagrams”.

In 1991, Francisco Javier Rencoret, a Chilean architect and then Fulbright scholar at Cornell University, published New York City: The Edge of Enigma, (Princeton Architectural Press), a visual essay that retraces the myth of the foundation and development of New York City.

Through more than 70 paintings, clearly indebted to Madelon Vriesendorp‘s illustrations of Rem Koolhaas‘ Delirious New York, and succinct texts, the author narrates the fictitious stories of the city, from the arrival of new inhabitants in an isolated island to the development of skyscrapers, Central Park and Times Square. However, rather than being a historic or documentary book, the work is a narrative reading of the City “that pushes back the boundaries of reality to include elements like fantasy, legend, power, and myth”. The volume was developed from a master’s thesis at Cornell University entitled “The Impact of the Narrative of the City of New York on Architectural Forms” and it aims at describing the identity of the City as being in a continuous transformative process rather than as a finite product.

The images make use of the technique of the collage and often mix up perspective projections, plans, axonometric projections, skyline photographs, and cartographic representations. The dirty-grey tones of the architectural and infrastructural elements are often complemented by limited insertions in red, green, blue and yellow.

New York City: The Edge of Enigma travels along that fine edge between the tangible and the intangible, the permanent and the transitory, the historical and the fictitious, the secretive and the revelatory. It does not pretend to delineate this edge; instead, the narrator’s voice crosses this hypothetical line at undisclosed points, illustrating New York City’s fantastic truth.

(Excerpt from the “Afterword”).

Here follow selected images from the book: