Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople
28 November 2022
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople28 November 2022
This is the third text in this series where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. William Lethaby’s second book, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, published in 1894, could hardly have started on its subject more emphatically, ‘Sancta Sophia is the most… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21 November 2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21 November 2022
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
Queensway, Hong Kong
4 November 2022
Queensway, Hong Kong4 November 2022
What I knew of Hong Kong before I moved here came from film and photography. It was a dense, post-modern city that in earlier decades had been characterised by its economic success. Since the turn of the century, the city has been pummelled by shocks and anxieties. Life in Hong… Read More
Heinz Isler Model
2 November 2022
Heinz Isler Model2 November 2022
– John Chilton and Paul Shepherd
This text was written by Paul Shepherd. The interjections, in italic, are additions by his friend and Heinz Isler expert John Chilton. If you go down to the woods today… Since our son was away on Scout camp all weekend, my plans for Sunday involved a much-needed lie-in and an… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman
24 October 2022
W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman24 October 2022
This is the second text in this series where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Dissatisfied with his first book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, a year later William Lethaby indicated a significant shift in thinking with the essay, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’. The text… Read More
Stendhal’s Autobiography: La Vie de Henri Brulard
14 October 2022
Stendhal’s Autobiography: La Vie de Henri Brulard14 October 2022
Soft childish snow swirled on the sidewalk in New York. Lecture given, Christmas presents bought, two hours before the bus to Newark. Outside a bookstore a stall of paperbacks to clear, and there it is, the New York Review of Books’ paperback edition of La Vie du Henri Brulard, Stendhal’s autobiography of… Read More
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints
12 October 2022
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints12 October 2022
One of the great enigmas of ukiyo-e – Japanese woodblock prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is the anachronistic intrusion of Western drawing into an apparently closed world; that the sophisticated culture of Edo (now modern Tokyo) seemingly closed off its borders since the Middle Ages. The widespread… Read More
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review
10 October 2022
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review10 October 2022
There is a strange moment in the second room of the exhibition, where all kinds of great works are hung on the walls to admire, organised around a central display of plastic and aluminium furniture: a collage of a car hovering like the golden calf amidst a crazed crowd; a… Read More
Materia 3: Red Oxide
30 September 2022
Materia 3: Red Oxide30 September 2022
This text is the third in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The first and second texts in the series, on render and corrugated iron, can be read here. Architects are subsumed within… Read More
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture
23 September 2022
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture23 September 2022
– Editors
These three sketches are from a sketchbook that Robert Maxwell used while studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1944. They are reproduced here to mark the publication of Robert Maxwell: the Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture, edited by Celia Scott, which is now available through Drawing… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto
9 September 2022
Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto9 September 2022
Looking at This was a long time ago/now this is lost, as well as other drawings in Rossi’s unofficial collection of l’architettura assassinata, brings to mind the image of a feast. The scenes are funereal indeed, but they hold a festive aura, as if a celebration had just taken place… Read More
Open Letters: Harvard GSD
2 December 2022
Open Letters: Harvard GSD2 December 2022
– Paul Mosley
Drawing Matter has been enjoying Open Letters, published bi-weekly by Harvard University Graduate School Of Design, from the start. In part, this is because our own publishing initiative began at much at the same time – now ten years ago – and proceeds at the same pace, and with a little of the… Read More
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