Category: commentaries, rants & reflections

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

John Pudney

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Excuse My Dust, or the Air I Breathe: Notes on Architecture in the Archives

Excuse My Dust, or the Air I Breathe: Notes on Architecture in the Archives

Marco Moro

The following text is a partially revised version of that delivered and published in ‘Stoà Open Seminar. Emerging perspectives on teaching and research in architectural design’ (May 2024). It has since become the conceptual framework for a series of seminars held on the same subject at the School of Architecture… Read More

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space 

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space 

Aikaterini Antonopoulou

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space by Paul Carter mediates between graphic form and text, movement-tracking, and place-making to delineate the interstices of public space: what escapes its formal description and what falls outside official design. The book responds to pertinent concerns about the interface between the designers of public… Read More

Reading Dirty Old River

Reading Dirty Old River

Marwa El Mubark

The act of looking is complex. It varies depending on the observer, the medium, and what is being observed. In Dirty Old River, the observer, Tom Emerson, is looking at the world through the eyes of photographers, writers, and artists among a larger set of characters. The observed range of artefacts… Read More

Tolerance

Tolerance

Tom Emerson

Too many people have talked about how profoundly the production of architecture has changed in the wake of the digital revolution. Far fewer have noted how architecture has resisted the seductive flourishes of digital production and maintained a dogged continuity with social and historical space. Bricks remain bricky even when… Read More

In the Archive: Maristella Casciato

In the Archive: Maristella Casciato

Maristella Casciato

From April to July, Maristella Casciato was Drawing Matter’s Visiting Scholar—our first in London. During her time in the archive, she made new discoveries and started many stimulating conversations. Among other things, she closely studied Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Punjab Grille Capitol album, translated a selection of Gio Ponti’s illustrated letters,… Read More

Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks

Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks

Polly Hutchison

In early July, Polly Hutchison from the Natural History Museum spent an afternoon at Drawing Matter examining a number of specimens from John Ruskin’s collection of siliceous minerals. In this short film, Polly explains the geological processes by which they were made and some of the resulting characteristics that likely… Read More

Living Landscapes: Narrative Maps from The John Rylands Library

Living Landscapes: Narrative Maps from The John Rylands Library

Rory Chisholm

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of… Read More

Genius loci

Genius loci

Mehdi Zannad

This text was first published in French in d’a | d’architectures (no 322,11 December 2024) as a review of the exhibition Trompe-l’oeil, from 1520 to the present day, which was on show at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris from 17 October 2024 to 2 March 2025.  * It is difficult to distinguish between the… Read More

Sourcing Superstudio

Sourcing Superstudio

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

Studio Ponis: The Crystal and the Flame

Studio Ponis: The Crystal and the Flame

Irina Davidovici, Niall Hobhouse, Alex Pillen, Jonathan Sergison and Annarita Zalaffi

On Friday 20 June, Drawing Matter welcomed Annarita Zalaffi, Jonathan Sergison, Irina Davidovici, and Alex Pillen to the archive for a conversation about the work of Studio Ponis in Sardinia, and Alberto Ponis and Annarita Zalaffi’s working relationship. The conversation marked the opening of an exhibition of drawings from the… Read More

Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition

Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition

Majed Alghaemdi

Saudi Arabia’s Quest for Modern Identity and the Urban Transformation of Riyadh Beginning in the 1960s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious building programme, resulting in numerous architectural projects recognised internationally for their remarkable scale as well as their innovative architectural and engineering solutions.[1] This extensive initiative gained substantial momentum from… Read More

We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68

We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68

Carl Williams

Against Pairing Drawing Matter generously responded to my request to loan two items from their collection to be used as realia in an exhibition of May 1968 posters at Tank Magazine’s showroom on Great Portland Street. The items (DMC 2465 and 2302) are both lithographs in black and red, and… Read More

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

Abel Sloane

After entering Smart’s Place, and climbing the steep staircase of treads (that become increasingly high and shallow until all the tension in my body was focused on my toes gripping and my weight not leaning back*), I arrived at the space of Drawing Matter where Rosie had indiscriminately laid out… Read More

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

C.M. Howell

Introduction A steady trickle of works on Dom Hans Van der Laan has appeared in the years since his passing in 1991. Most important among these, Richard Padovan has presented a compelling argument for the significance of Van der Laan’s theory of proportion through a series of texts, including Dom… Read More

Isou’s Bouleversement

Isou’s Bouleversement

Editors

Je pense que par la masse des définitions nouvelles et par la masse des secteurs inédits dévoilés, ce petit livre est le plus important ouvrage paru dans toute l’historie de l’architecture ou du moins le plus important ouvrage paru depuis plusieurs siécles en ce domaine. I believe that in terms… Read More

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

Nicholas Ray

It’s the sign of a good book about an architect that you want to drop everything and go out to visit, or re-visit, their buildings. And a sure indication of a good book that reproduces many architectural drawings is that you want to be able to pore over the originals… Read More

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Bahar Avanoğlu

‘Barely Traced, the true drawing escapes.’[1]  On a late night while reading Latife Tekin’s Zamansız (Timeless or Without Time)–a tale of love embedded in a lake, unfolded within the obscured semblances of a weasel and an eel–I found myself moving my lips, whispering: ‘Frii-iii-er-frii-ii-frii’. As I read the words printed on the paper, I… Read More

Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students

Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students

Mary Mitchell

In 1999, I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University studying Architectural History when I undertook a work placement at the university archives. Here I was asked to help organise an uncatalogued collection received from the Patrick Geddes Centre at the Outlook Tower. Within this collection were 12 portfolios. Portfolio 7… Read More

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Pierre Chabard

Tête-à-tête Charles Vandenhove’s transformation of the Hôtel Torrentius in Liège’s Rue Saint-Pierre between 1977 and 1981 marked a crucial point in the trajectory of both the building and the architect. When, in November 1977, Vandenhove purchased the mansion to set up his architectural practice and city home, the building was… Read More

8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense

8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense

Emily Priest

This text concludes a series of studies by Emily Priest that began at Shatwell Farm during her stay on site in September 2023. How do you organise an architectural archive? Should it be ordered alphabetically? Should it be ordered by date? Should it be ordered by size? Should it be organised by type of object? How do… Read More

Haunted Venice

Haunted Venice

Mark West

After Niall Hobhouse saw an image of my collage, Venice Haunted, he sent me some comparable images, including a Hogarth frontispiece for a book on perspective theory and practice (1745). Its caption reads: ‘Whoever makes a design without the knowledge of perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are… Read More

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Laura Harty

‘He pulls down, he builds up, he exchanges square for round.‘Horace—Epistles. I. 1. 100[1] The Aldo van Eyck drawing currently on show at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields appears, at first glance, to do precisely this. A preliminary drawing, one made for the design of the architect’s own house, on transparent… Read More

Eisenman on Rossi

Eisenman on Rossi

Peter Eisenman

Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping… Read More