Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Palladio’s Lines
15 October 2020
Palladio’s Lines15 October 2020
By Sezin Sarıca
Andrea Palladio’s Il Quattro Libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570) is a seminal document in the history and theory of architecture. The treatise projects the knowledge of both architectural form and its image. The formation of this knowledge is documented within Palladio’s work textually and visually. The work conveys both the formation… Read More
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall
13 October 2020
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall13 October 2020
The following notes were composed by Pierre du Prey to accompany his gift of the sketches pictured above to Drawing Matter, 16 September 2020. The circumstances surrounding two detailed sketches by Raymond Erithof the John Soane gate lodges at Tendring Hall, Suffolk, remain stronglyimpressed on the tablets of my memory.… Read More
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of
13 October 2020
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of13 October 2020
By Elizabeth Hatz, Gerard Carty and Fionn O'Leary
In the Autumn of 2019, tutors Elizabeth Hatz and Gerard Carty visited the Drawing Matter archive with their fourth-year students from the School of Architecture and the University of Limerick (SAUL). Below is a record of their visit and its place in the context of the fourth-year studio. Tutors interested… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War
29 September 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War29 September 2020
Niccolò Machiavelli concludes his treatise on the art of war (Dell’Arte della Guerra, 1521) with a series of diagrammatic ‘figures’ illustrating the arrangements of troops known as ordinanze. Rather than using human silhouettes, the ordinanza links alphabetical signs to specific roles and positions of the soldiers, reducing the army to… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 3: Averted Vision
28 September 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 3: Averted Vision28 September 2020
This is the third 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 Andrew Clancy of Clancy Moore Architects and Professor of Architecture at… Read More
WRITING PRIZE 2020: Drawing People
23 September 2020
WRITING PRIZE 2020: Drawing People23 September 2020
By Daniel Innes
Representations of people are central to our ability to inhabit drawings, to make sense of them, understand their scale, their atmosphere, their character: to exist in the world that the drawing constructs. These images of people are immediately recognisable by all, but are we all able to recognise ourselves amongst… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31 August 2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31 August 2020
By Julian Lewis
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued
30 July 2020
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued30 July 2020
When Drawing Matter recently reproduced a preliminary ground plan for Combe House near Gittisham, Devon, by John Soane, I had a moment’s sudden recollection. Ptolemy Dean’s penetrating analysis of this precious if battered sheet of paper – entirely in the astonishingly fluid and energetic hand of the architect – set me to search… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 1
30 July 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 130 July 2020
This is the first 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 the drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio writes of his own experience as a tutor and… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28 July 2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28 July 2020
By Stan Allen and José Oubrerie
‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha
20 October 2020
Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha20 October 2020
By Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara
This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. We… Read More
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