Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Protected: Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space
28.08.2025
Protected: Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space 28.08.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks
11.08.2025
Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks11.08.2025
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
01.08.2025
Living Landscapes: Narrative Maps from The John Rylands Library01.08.2025
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
24.07.2025
Genius loci24.07.2025
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
04.07.2025
Sourcing Superstudio04.07.2025
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
02.07.2025
Studio Ponis: The Crystal and the Flame02.07.2025
– 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
23.06.2025
Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition23.06.2025
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
23.05.2025
We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 6823.05.2025
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
19.05.2025
N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory19.05.2025
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)
16.05.2025
Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)16.05.2025
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
14.04.2025
Isou’s Bouleversement14.04.2025
– 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
27.03.2025
The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times27.03.2025
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
24.03.2025
Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers24.03.2025
‘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
10.03.2025
Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students10.03.2025
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
8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense
24.02.2025
8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense24.02.2025
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
21.02.2025
Haunted Venice21.02.2025
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
14.02.2025
Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis14.02.2025
‘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
12.02.2025
Eisenman on Rossi12.02.2025
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
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper
31.01.2025
Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper31.01.2025
The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend… Read More
Anton Markus Pasing
30.01.2025
Anton Markus Pasing30.01.2025
Münster, March 2024 Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. Nearly fifty years ago Nigel Coates writing in my Villa Auto AA exhibition catalogue chose the above quote from Roland Barthes to describe my pathological production of architectural fictions. These were hand-drawn, a… Read More
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration
23.01.2025
Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration23.01.2025
On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events,… Read More
For AP + AR
20.01.2025
For AP + AR20.01.2025
Long, thin and crisp, sun-bleached, rose-blushed. Thousand-time photocopied notations of notations. Struck-through with highlighter, corrected and recorrected re-negotiated, scribbled and walked across. I walk together with AP e AR, our thin nibbed-shoes picking careful tracks between sharpie chasms. We leak behind us inky trails, to be washed away by the… Read More
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato
01.09.2025
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato01.09.2025
– 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
DMC in the archive (project)