Architect: Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Sylvia Lavin

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

In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid

Christiane Matt

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

The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection

Editors

The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.

Trees Move In

Trees Move In

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

Origins in Translation

Origins in Translation

Mari Lending

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

Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture

Rebecca Williamson

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

Alternative Histories: Hayatsu Architects on Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen

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

without irony 2

without irony 2

Niall Hobhouse

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

A.L.T. Vaudoyer

Basile Baudez

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

Landscape situations

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