On Tony Fretton’s Sketchbook, 1981 (Video)
Tony Fretton’s earliest sketchbooks contained within the collection at Drawing Matter are not records of projects developing page by page. They are stranger and more useful than that. Notes, sketches, references, lists, details, business, fragments of furniture and architecture sit beside one another without much concern for order.
For an emerging practitioner, that feels familiar. They show the moment before a method has settled, when practice and design are being worked out at the same time. The sketchbook becomes part diary, part journal, part office, part design space; a place where everything that might matter is gathered before it is fully understood.
The sketchbook feels lived in.
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Benjamin Machin is an architect and director of Studio Benjamin Machin, a London practice working on homes, housing, and small buildings. He teaches architecture at Loughborough University, leads the Drawing Matter and Zaha Hadid Foundation Summer School, and is part of the New Architects 5 cohort.
– Richard Hall