Architect: Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen
On origins and originality
15 November 2024
On origins and originality15 November 2024
The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11 July 2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11 July 2023
What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid
22 March 2022
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid22 March 2022
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. On a crisp January morning I made my way to York railway station to visit… Read More
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21 February 2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21 February 2022
– Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
Origins in Translation
20 January 2020
Origins in Translation20 January 2020
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture
26 December 2019
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture26 December 2019
One of the best-known drawings related to the discipline is the ‘allegory of architecture’, drawn by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen and engraved by Jean-Jacques Aliamet. [1] The original is now in the collection of Drawing Matter. Aliamet’s engraving serves as the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, and was included… Read More
Alternative Histories: Hayatsu Architects on Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen
6 February 2019
Alternative Histories: Hayatsu Architects on Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen6 February 2019
Architecture evolves through material transformations, copying one from another, much like how Greek temples adopted using stone instead of wood. Casting is an act of copying. Bronze is an ancient material used by humankind dating back to the mid-4th millennium BC. It is a ductile alloy which does not corrode… Read More
A.L.T. Vaudoyer
4 May 2017
A.L.T. Vaudoyer4 May 2017
Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite is part of a series of projects from the end of the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée’s Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere… Read More
Landscape situations
21 January 2011
Landscape situations21 January 2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Setting it out: making the landscape For Horace Walpole, William Kent was born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. ‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.’ With apparent innocence, the sketch Landscape in Wimbledon proposes only… Read More
Trees Move In
22 October 2020
Trees Move In22 October 2020
– Sylvia Lavin
The following text is the second of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
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