Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Models of Models: The House Transformed
17.08.2026
Models of Models: The House Transformed17.08.2026
The house is architecture’s most overdetermined subject. It carries the weight of every disciplinary trope, cultural norm, political aspiration, and sentimental projection that can be placed on a building. To approach it critically—and to argue that its conventions have been an instrument of exclusion rather than a neutral container—is itself… Read More
The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries
30.07.2026
The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries30.07.2026
This unknown eighteenth-century French textile sample pattern book is an intriguing addition to the Drawing Matter collection. Is it architecture, or is it here through a taxonomic error? Either way, how should we approach reading it within this architectural context? The book opens to roughly A3 in format, and each… Read More
Weave & Disturbance
27.07.2026
Weave & Disturbance27.07.2026
Against a polyhedral, reticulated pale blue background, a pale terracotta network of ducts spreads out like ivy. It twists, branches, and folds back upon itself: a technological nervous system recording the temperature of the seventies. The drawing is precise, informative, and aesthetically autonomous. Ink and graphite on tracing paper. It… Read More
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process
23.07.2026
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 23.07.2026
– Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle
The following conversation between Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle, publishing director at RIBA, was conducted on 30 December 2021 and has been adapted from a text, originally presented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (Routledge, 2023). It traces the development of Cantley’s experimental drawing practice through Form:uLA—a body of work sustained since… Read More
On Tony Fretton’s Sketchbook, 1981 (Video)
17.07.2026
On Tony Fretton’s Sketchbook, 1981 (Video) 17.07.2026
Tony Fretton’s earliest sketchbooks contained within the collection at Drawing Matter are not records of projects developing page by page. They are stranger and more useful than that. Notes, sketches, references, lists, details, business, fragments of furniture and architecture sit beside one another without much concern for order. For an… Read More
Protected: The Temple
29.06.2026
Protected: The Temple29.06.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Mapping Water
26.06.2026
Mapping Water26.06.2026
Some years ago, I travelled to Egypt and visited the Suez Canal—the international water passage that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. While standing on a small pier in Ismailia, I watched the huge cargo ships passing; the canal seemed more like a water highway. At the same time,… Read More
Invented from Copies
18.06.2026
Invented from Copies18.06.2026
In 1980, Fred A. Stitt, the doyen of American authors of handbooks on the technical and managerial aspects of architectural practice, defined the distinction between drawing and copy drafting (to use the American spelling of draughting) in uncompromising terms: Drawing is an originating process: a creative, aesthetic, and problem-solving process.… Read More
The Primacy of Drawing
15.06.2026
The Primacy of Drawing15.06.2026
The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge’s magisterial survey of the place of drawing in European art since the Renaissance, was first published by Yale University Press in 2010. Weighing in at 520 pages, it was a formidable achievement of vast erudition and profound insight, the fruits of more than two… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove – La maison où j’ai grandi
11.06.2026
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove – La maison où j’ai grandi11.06.2026
This is the eighth and concluding part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series here. * Curtains The newly restored house appeared, on the cover no… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds
04.06.2026
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds04.06.2026
In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes the first hundred pages of his bestselling 1980 novel as a form of penance, ‘for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterwards.’[1] Beyond creating an easy heuristic for who should or should not descend further into the world of… Read More
The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad
28.05.2026
The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad28.05.2026
– Editors
In the first three months of 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum presented a small exhibition dedicated to Le Corbusier’s unrealised Olympic Stadium Project for Baghdad. The show was organised by the RIBA, Irena Murray, and Peter Carl, with work loaned from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Fondation… Read More
Protected: The Drawing as a Site of Absence
26.05.2026
Protected: The Drawing as a Site of Absence26.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
My Parish Drawings
19.05.2026
My Parish Drawings19.05.2026
From an early age I was in love with China and all things Chinese. I don’t know what inspired this passion, but a few years ago I came upon a Rupert Bear cartoon strip and there was the Emperor of China aloft on a flying carpet. I know my father… Read More
Siza on Paper (Exhibition + Talk)
18.05.2026
Siza on Paper (Exhibition + Talk)18.05.2026
– Editors
On Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 March, Drawing Matter presented an exhibition of drawings by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. The exhibition focused on Siza as a designer of public housing after the Carnation Revolution (1974) and his approaches to drawing. At the centre of the exhibition were three housing… Read More
Philip Christou: 34 Drawings
11.05.2026
Philip Christou: 34 Drawings11.05.2026
…a rigid adherence to a mathematical or logical system when forming a plan tends to make the design detached, mechanical and unresponsive to its site and surroundings—its situation—and make the building overly self-referential. However, when the regular system has cadence, is dynamic and can be disrupted or contaminated by the… Read More
Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture
08.05.2026
Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture08.05.2026
The following fictional text was extracted from William Firebrace’s Scaletales (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln, 2026). The book investigates the various meanings of the word scale through a story about two elderly women on a journey from Finland through central Europe to the Black Sea. They… Read More
The Incessant Power of Drawings
05.05.2026
The Incessant Power of Drawings05.05.2026
We have come to doubt the real necessity of being exposed to original artefacts, as we find ourselves drowned in a deluge of endless reproductions. Why bother visiting galleries and museums when one can check stuff on the web? A picture of teenagers scrolling their cellphones in front of a… Read More
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing
30.04.2026
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing30.04.2026
On the 12th of March 1968, Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay wrote, as he did frequently throughout the late 1960s, to friend and architect Philip Steadman. ‘Dear Phil,’ he began, ‘I have been meaning for some time to ask if you could help me with some rough drawings, of… Read More
The Open Hand Reloaded
24.04.2026
The Open Hand Reloaded24.04.2026
The above notes are based on a paper first presented at the workshop Long Table Conversation on ‘NonAligned Modernism’ held at the University of Washington in Seattle on October 31, 2025, moderated by Adair Rounthwaite (Art History) and with an introduction by Vikram Prakash (HHF/Architecture). * Maristella Casciato (architect, architectural… Read More
The House Stands Still While Life Moves
17.04.2026
The House Stands Still While Life Moves17.04.2026
The house has a floor sticky like honey; our feet cling to it and we cannot get away from it. The house is a rucksack so huge and full on our shoulders that every movement becomes impossible. The house is an unconditional refuge for those who fear all the mishaps… Read More
Rewriting Eisenman
06.04.2026
Rewriting Eisenman06.04.2026
In his new book Rewriting Alberti, Peter Eisenman applies the ‘most important lesson in architecture’ that he ever received to a study of the origin of the discipline in the Western tradition.[1] Standing at the fount of that tradition is the fifteenth-century Florentine scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti.[2] From… Read More
Protected: Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination
18.08.2026
Protected: Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination18.08.2026
– Lina Malfona
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Book presentation review sketch