Category: commentaries, rants & reflections

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Andrew Carr

Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More

Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture

Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture

C. M. Howell

The defining characteristics of modern architecture took shape against a host of disorientating shifts in the 19th century. On the theoretical side, the instantiation and development of aesthetics as an autonomous realm strained a sacred harmony between beauty, truth, and goodness. On the practical side, technological, social, and cultural advancements… Read More

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Timothy Christian Murphy

‘Work with your hands, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.’1 Thess. 4:11-12 All architecture begins with our hands. We make physical what we understand in order to communicate the invisible to the outside world. The translation… Read More

Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan

Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan

Francesco Marullo

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. The… Read More

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Matt Page

Fraser Stables speaks quietly through his series Remembering Architecture. There is a staid documentarian quality to his photographs, but not that of architectural photography. When architectural details—the meeting of nature and architecture, light falling on surfaces—are made the focus, the images speak more to a sensitive process of recording moments; and in many… Read More

Alberto Ponis: Drawing Landscape

Alberto Ponis: Drawing Landscape

Team SHICHAI拾柴

This is film was made by team SHICHAI拾柴 for the exhibition ‘Drawing Landscape: Alberto Ponis,’ exhibited at Tongji University, Shanghai, 10 April—20 May 2023. It concludes a series of posts on Drawing Matter pairing team SHICHAI拾柴’s films with drawings from our collection; find these in the ‘related reading’ below.

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Hook & Extension

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Hook & Extension

Adrian Dannatt

Liza Fior, whose phone was used to take these snaps (I still refuse the portable-telephone obligation), was particularly taken by this hook for the garage door, the way it hangs, the perhaps deliberate chipping into the stone, ‘I am sure he planned it’. That minute attention to the smallest thing,… Read More

Quinta da Malagueira

Quinta da Malagueira

Pier Vittorio Aureli

In this short text Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on Quinta da Malagueira housing project in what he sees as a potential convergence between formal principals and political intentions. Quinta da Malagueira is perhaps the last great ‘social housing project’. That is, it is the last great architectural contribution to the… Read More

A Gentler Giant

A Gentler Giant

Leif Findlay

Faced with the grand statues of Ramesses II in Abu Simbel, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi wrote ‘We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so… Read More

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

Alberto Cruz

Alberto Cruz presented the principles of The Palace of Dawn and Dusk (Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso) in the Open City’s Music Room on 19 January 1981[1]. While the initial project comprised four lodges with communal rooms, courtyards, and public baths, ultimately, as Cruz describes, following a ‘poetic revelation’… Read More

Building as Drawing: the Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm

Building as Drawing: the Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm

Helen Thomas

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here.… Read More

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Joseph Bedford

The following text is reproduced from The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), edited by Caroline Voet, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas. The publication is available in print or as an ebook, here. You can find Joseph Bedford on Instagram here. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many architects… Read More