Architect: Adolfo Natalini
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
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
9 February 2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)9 February 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 January 2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18 January 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
2 November 2021
Drawing Powers 3: the drawing in the object2 November 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
4 October 2021
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum4 October 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 February 2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17 February 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 February 2021
The Problem with Rainbows12 February 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 January 2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13 January 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
7 November 2020
Tree Speech7 November 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 August 2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31 August 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 March 2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25 March 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
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo
5 February 2024
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo5 February 2024
– Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo
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
in the archive (project)