Derham Groves

Recently a group of third-year architecture students at the University of Melbourne had to read a Sherlock Holmes story and then portray the victim in that story by altering the appearance of a Barbie or Ken doll. (I got this idea from the ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’, 18 dollhouse-sized dioramas of grisly crime scenes that were built by the International Harvester heiress Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee during the 1940s.) They produced a horrifying collection of dolls that had been bludgeoned, garroted, hanged, mauled, poisoned, scared, shot, stabbed and strangled. (The three featured dolls were constructed by Chen Gong, Nicholas Antoniou and Morsaleena Moytree Paruque.)

Jerzy Faczynski (1917-1995) was a Polish architect who migrated to England in 1939. He is perhaps best remembered for writing Studies in Polish Architecture (1946) and designing St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Leyland (1964). He was also an inveterate scribbler and recently hundreds of his sketches have come on the market, often selling for only a couple of dollars apiece. Here are three delightful ‘post modern’ sketches by him.