Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery
18.09.2026
Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery18.09.2026
– Luis Callejas and Julia Spackman
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
An Interview with David Connor
18.09.2026
An Interview with David Connor18.09.2026
– Gianni Botsford and David Connor
* Gianni Botsford (GB): What I said that I could talk to you about is where it all started for you, how you learned to draw, where your drawing method came from, and how it developed over time. David Connor (DC): I did start to draw when I was 4 or 5, which would… Read More
DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier
11.09.2026
DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier 11.09.2026
Derek Boshier’s 16 Situations (1971) could be experienced both in print and as an installation. The exhibition, which toured from early 1971 before being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in September and October 1973, was simple in concept: the viewer followed a wall with 16 altered photographic images, each one with the… Read More
Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination
03.09.2026
Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination03.09.2026
‘The drawing represents the medianic exploration of the shaded side of reason and, contradictorily, the scene of an ideal landscape in which the architect believes he will be happy. As the place of theoretical truth, the drawing institutes itself independently of architecture. Superior to architecture by the fact that it… Read More
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing
02.09.2026
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing02.09.2026
– Denise Scott Brown and Ariel Koltun-Fromm
The following interview is excerpted from a longer conversation between Ariel Koltun-Fromm and Denise Scott Brown which took place in April 2024 at her home in Philadelphia. It is part of a larger research project by Ariel investigating drawing as a means of interrogating existing places. * Ariel Koltun-Fromm (AKF):… Read More
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
‘Unschärfe’
24.09.2026
‘Unschärfe’24.09.2026
– Fabian Tobias Reiner
Four sketches and a photograph, scanned together, form a single drawing. Its pencil lines release an energy that condenses, figures, and elaborates without intention for the ruly. Quickly drawn and redrawn, slightly smudged, and enigmatically annotated, the top-left lines dwell on forces of form. Initially layered, subsequently intertwined. To their… Read More
Open Call: Visibility, and the Unseen photograph sketch