Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Protected: The Primacy of Drawing
27.05.2026
Protected: The Primacy of Drawing27.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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
Protected: Mapping Water
29.04.2026
Protected: Mapping Water29.04.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries
29.04.2026
Protected: The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries29.04.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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
On Cedric Price
02.04.2026
On Cedric Price02.04.2026
Cedric Price’s thinking and work have had a very particular influence on my work, in the sense that some fundamental choices I have made as an architect have been deeply influenced by his philosophy. In this sense, it seems to me that Cedric Price was one of the few architects… Read More
A Taste for Architectural Drawings
01.04.2026
A Taste for Architectural Drawings01.04.2026
The smelling and tasting of historical architectural drawings have been overlooked by scholars as valuable research tools, particularly in matters of dating and authorship. In this short discussion—a foretaste of a future volume, or two, that I intend to write on the subject—I demonstrate that drawings made by architects, including… Read More
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural
30.03.2026
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural30.03.2026
Drawing Matter holds a large number of drawings, prints and other materials relating to a project for an office building in Kansas City designed by Louis Kahn. The project was one of the last that the architect worked on before his death in 1974, and many of the drawings carry… Read More
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’
20.03.2026
The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’20.03.2026
Alexander Scott Carter’s winning designs for single and double-fronted W.H. Smith shopfronts form a remote bookend to a troubled time for architectural competitions in Britain. The other arrived approximately 75 years earlier in the form of a satirical drawing produced to open Augustus Pugin’s Contrasts (1836). It too was a… Read More
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House
19.03.2026
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House19.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
André des Gachons: Weather Warning
19.03.2026
André des Gachons: Weather Warning19.03.2026
The recent publication, La Veille du ciel: aquarelles météorologiques (Phénomène éditions), one of the most beautiful books published in 2025, gathers together forty years of daily weather reports by André des Gachons on the skies above the small rural commune of La Chaussée-sur-Marne, in eastern France. Des Gachons remained subjective… Read More
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
Massinissa Selmani
09.03.2026
Massinissa Selmani 09.03.2026
The nomination of the Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani for the 2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp was an official acknowledgement that a practice grounded primarily in pencil drawing on paper on a modest scale can constitute a major contribution to contemporary art.[1] In Selmani’s abbreviated aesthetic, weighty ideas are carried by the… 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
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