Architect: Peter Wilson

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Peter Wilson

Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More

Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 1985

Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 1985

Editors

This project scrapbook was prompted by Drawing Matter’s recent acquisition of drawings by Peter Wilson and Luc Deleu, made in response to Aldo Rossi’s ‘Progetto Venezia’ brief for the 1985 Venice Biennale, which invited proposals for a new Accademia Bridge to replace the wooden one constructed in the 1930s. Wilson… Read More

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Adrian Hawker

In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings in which the site is the designer’s focus. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More

Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022

Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022

Peter Wilson

Remote teaching as a pandemic consequence has already been a theme for Drawing Matter, in the January 2022 Melbourne University Venice Workshop it reached an almost surreal zenith. Remoteness is fundamental to Australia, whether the extreme separations of the outback or a pre-digital geographic estrangement from global cultural discourses. At… Read More

Drawing Powers 2: the object in the drawing

Drawing Powers 2: the object in the drawing

Fernando Poeiras

This text is the second 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. First, I consider drawing as an adequate medium… Read More

From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time

From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time

Peter Wilson

The absolute precision and technical specificity of Diderot’s encyclopaedia plates, particularly those devoted to Horlogerie, mark a critical moment in the transition from speculative to operative science, from the pre-industrial to a modernist ontology of technical instrumentalisation. Here on these pages, artisan craft is ransomed to the immanent logic of… Read More

Cartographies of the Imagination

Cartographies of the Imagination

Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah

Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

Peter Wilson

Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More

The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish

The Intention of Suspension: Peter Wilson’s Clandeboye Fish

Gabrielle Eglen

A phenomenological reading of ‘bridge’ would not prioritise function (crossing) but this suspended moment. – Peter Wilson [1] A fish out of water, a lady in thought, floating ‘wilderness’. Things first have to be separated from each other so as to be united later on. [2]  Peter Wilson’s drawings of… Read More

Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing

Order and Uncertainty in Architectural Drawing

Luke Tipene

How we look at architectural drawings is an inherently complicated topic. The issue arises from what we understand to appear and disappear on the page. The field of architecture has spent little time talking about what we see (and don’t see) on the surface of the drawing itself. One could… Read More

La Casa Della Falsita

La Casa Della Falsita

Peter Wilson

The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More