Architect: Adolfo Natalini
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo
05.02.2024
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo05.02.2024
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. During the peaceful and beautiful train ride that goes from London Paddington to Castle Cary, I dedicated time to thinking about what… Read More
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11.07.2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11.07.2023
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
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
09.02.2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)09.02.2023
– Editors
Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio
18.01.2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18.01.2023
This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More
Drawing Powers 3: The Drawing in the Object
02.11.2021
Drawing Powers 3: The Drawing in the Object02.11.2021
This text is the third in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. It was the drawing that led me to architecture,… Read More
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum
04.10.2021
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum04.10.2021
There is a handwritten phrase in red ink at the bottom of this sketch, which reads in Italian: ‘for the continuous monument (genesis)’. This drawing is from one of Adolfo Natalini’s sketchbooks and depicts a series of studies about the earth. In the same sketchbook, he drew multiple sequences of… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17.02.2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17.02.2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
The Problem with Rainbows
12.02.2021
The Problem with Rainbows12.02.2021
Resta sempre insoluto il problema dell’arcobalenoPare que ce ne sia uno dopo la pioggiaE che dall’alto con l’aereoSi veda tutto tornaMa questo metterebbe in crisi tutto quelliChe cercano la pentola d’oro Alle fine dell’arcobaleno C’e sempre un arcobalenoAl di sopra di ogni questione sulla quantitàE qualità dei suoi coloriDopo la pioggiaMa non dopo ogni pioggia… Read More
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic
13.01.2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13.01.2021
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More
Tree Speech
07.11.2020
Tree Speech07.11.2020
The following text is the fourth 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 reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31.08.2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31.08.2020
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25.03.2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25.03.2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
Alternative Histories: Eagles of Architecture on Adolfo Natalini
29.07.2019
Alternative Histories: Eagles of Architecture on Adolfo Natalini29.07.2019
Hope as an attitude.Hope in the merging of two conflictual realities.Hope when considering the multiplicity of realms around which the encounter revolves. The paradigm which lays at the heart of the SUPERSTUDIO sketch raises a series of urgencies, doubts, eventualities.The model aims at intensifying these. In the model, a shift… Read More
Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio
12.01.2019
Alternative Histories: GAFPA on Superstudio12.01.2019
We received a sketch made by Superstudio, the Italian architecture firm renowned for its conceptual architecture works.In the famous 1966 exhibition ‘Super Architecture’ the squared grid is used in a variety of scales from the simplest objects of furniture, such as a table, to an urban landscape.Through a series of… Read More
Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow
23.12.2018
Superstudio: In Yesterday’s Tomorrow23.12.2018
‘Metamorphoses become frequent when a culture does not have sufficient courage to commit suicide (to eliminate itself) and has no clear alternatives to offer either‘ – Adolfo Natalini Following social and economic upheaval, there is often a retreat to the home. Traditionally, the ‘home’ is identified with a site of… Read More
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell
09.10.2018
The Continuous Monument, Shatwell09.10.2018
To provoke an archaeology of collage making Niall Hobhouse asked Adolfo Natalini and Gian Piero Frassinelli to prepare a last collage, some 50 years after the first Continuous Monument, to imagine that it had finally arrived at Shatwell.
Notes on the Sketchbook
19.02.2018
Notes on the Sketchbook19.02.2018
When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’
31.08.2017
Child’s Play: Adolfo Natalini’s ‘Disegni Per Bambini’31.08.2017
In 1972 Adolfo Natalini spent a few months in the United States. The main event of his visit was the seminal exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in New York MoMA (May 26 – September 11, 1972). Nevertheless, Natalini spent these months not only working on perhaps the most existential project of… Read More
Sourcing Superstudio
04.07.2025
Sourcing Superstudio04.07.2025
– Martha Cruz
On the 21st page of Natalini’s 12th sketchbook (DMC 2141) there is a list of buildings and landmarks. It feels quite disparate at first. It begins as a chronological list of architecture’s greatest and most recognisable hits: Stonehenge… the Colosseum… the Uffizi… the Taj Mahal… Crystal Palace… the Eiffel Tower.… Read More
sketch sketchbook DMC