Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple
12 April 2021
The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple12 April 2021
By Frank Lyons
The Architecture of Nothingness: Drawing the Drawings As architects we have learned to read drawings almost instantly. At a glance we see what the spaces feel like, what it will be like to move around the building and perhaps even get a sense of the appropriateness of the structure. This ‘presentational’ way… Read More
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics
12 April 2021
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics12 April 2021
By Tom Cookson
It is the unique trait of the section drawing to fragment the singularity of built form, to allow the reading of a building as a series of individual pieces, and thereby delay our innate predilection – at least momentarily – for gestalt. Much like an erratic (in geology, an erratic is a material… Read More
Balzac architecte (1856)
9 April 2021
Balzac architecte (1856)9 April 2021
By Leon Gozlan
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield
31 March 2021
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield31 March 2021
Dear Nicholas, It was wonderful to connect to your seminar and with you. We must catch up soon. I learned a lot from your presentation. And it brought back a flood of memories. Just now I quickly sketched the open plan house my father designed and had built in 1946,… Read More
Review & Excerpts: Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020)
30 March 2021
Review & Excerpts: Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020)30 March 2021
By Helen Thomas
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard
29 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard29 March 2021
This is the tenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Guillaume Othenin-Girard discusses his studio at the University of Hong Kong which explored… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26 March 2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26 March 2021
By Paul Notley
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman
22 March 2021
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman22 March 2021
Laid down facing upwards and spread evenly on a neutral surface, 13 tin toys pose for a shot. Cedric Price’s robot collection – battery powered or clockwork, says the caption – includes a mechanical bird and rabbit, several spaceships, spacemen and robots. Their distinctive features intimate specific names, makers and… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms
19 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms19 March 2021
By Anuj Daga
This is the ninth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Anuj Daga, Assistant Professor at the School of Environment & Architecture, Mumbai, explores… Read More
The Floor Plan of a Room
17 March 2021
The Floor Plan of a Room17 March 2021
Drawn from memory, the floor plan of a room in which two plan chests stand apart like two rectangular islands, plain-faced in plan but each one a tower of uncountable lines, paper upon paper suspended and preserved within the pellucid sleeves of polyester where they lie dormant and entombed as… Read More
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16 March 2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16 March 2021
By George Dodds
The following text is an excerpt from George Dodds’ book Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005), an analysis of the historiography and mythography of Mies’s building and its afterlives. The author reminded the Drawing Matter editors of the text, in response to our publication in June 2020 of an… Read More
Open Wide / Wide Open
14 April 2021
Open Wide / Wide Open14 April 2021
By Angharad Davies
We started with six words: a short-term dwelling for an artist then added: with a child What adaptations have you made to your domestic space since having a child? / What adaptations have you made to your work space since having a child? / How / When / Where do… Read More
domestic