Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World
11 October 2024
Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World11 October 2024
A long time before the surge of the Internet and the diffusion of portable devices connected to it, seeping into our eyes incessant flows of images, the relationship of people to their surroundings was profoundly altered by photography, and then cinema. The carefully curated exhibition Photo City: How Images Shape the… Read More
Streetscapes: Bath
7 October 2024
Streetscapes: Bath7 October 2024
The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More
2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models
27 September 2024
2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models27 September 2024
– Jesper Authen and Matt Page
Drawing is the act of translating a thought to a mark on the page—where the hand is in conversation with the mind. This conversation is marked by an unbridgeable gap between the idea and the output—sometimes betraying and exposing the thought, and other times surprising you with an unintended vigour… Read More
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s
16 September 2024
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s16 September 2024
– Editors and John Summerson
In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School
6 September 2024
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School6 September 2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect
2 September 2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect2 September 2024
– Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki
It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows
19 August 2024
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows19 August 2024
– Holger Kleine and Anna Kostreva
‘The architecture of agency is the architecture of the cemetery. The power to change is the power to say goodbye.’ (Epigraph, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows) ‘The cemetery is a place made for the living to spatialize their emotions; certain things can happen there that can’t happen in other places.’… Read More
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge
9 August 2024
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge9 August 2024
The war to restore to churches ritual and at the same time architectural dignity was waged by one man and one society, the man being a fervent convert to Catholicism, the society calling itself Catholic too, but meaning what is called Anglo-Catholic. They operated independently, but appreciated one another. The… Read More
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate
5 August 2024
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate5 August 2024
Many people reach a point in their lives at which they realise that they should protest the status quo. Some people make the realisation but remain frustrated, stuck, or blocked from enacting the necessary change. How do we face, name, and act according to our most fundamental realisations and what… Read More
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2
22 July 2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 222 July 2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More
Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine
18 July 2024
Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine18 July 2024
Leaving the Architectural Association and starting at Ahrends Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1978 was a complete revelation to me. Here, instead of the layers of smudged graphite used to illustrate abstract drawings—as promoted by Dalibor Vesely for instance—graphite powder from your rotary pencil sharpener was used to shade the… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15 July 2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15 July 2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-1939
8 July 2024
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-19398 July 2024
When the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was asked to draw up an inventory of interwar buildings that deserved to be placed on the Statutory List, the so-called ‘Pevsner 50’ that resulted was almost entirely composed of the whitest of white modernist buildings. Similarly, John Summerson argued that the only thing… Read More
Shatwell Farm: Covering over, bagging up, tying down
1 July 2024
Shatwell Farm: Covering over, bagging up, tying down1 July 2024
This text is the fourth in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September 2023. Tarpaulin has its origins in 17th-century maritime communities. Sailors, who were nicknamed ‘tarpaulins’, used to sleep on decks under hard-wearing fabrics which were impregnated with tar- as a… Read More
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 1
20 June 2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 120 June 2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: What led you to architecture to begin with, Peter? You began studying… Read More
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action
9 May 2024
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action9 May 2024
Hermann Czech: Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action) is on show at Fanz-Josef-Kai 3, Vienna, from 16 March – 9 June, 2024. On 15 March 2024, an exhibition on the Austrian architect Hermann Czech’s work opened in Vienna at the exhibition space Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 (fJk3). It is the first retrospective… Read More
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture
1 May 2024
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture1 May 2024
This article first appeared in German: ‘Der gut gebaute Witz’ in Der Architekt 4/21 ‘Effekt und Affekt, Psychologie in der Architektur’ (2021), 60-63. 18 September 2021 Kurt W. Forster writing to Holger Kleine (translated from German) ‘… reading your essay on Paul Rudolph’s Hastings Hall. A fabulous piece, itself a kind of… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim
17 April 2024
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim17 April 2024
Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More
Shatwell Farm: Appendages
8 April 2024
Shatwell Farm: Appendages8 April 2024
This text is the third in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. We regularly speak of reusing and refurbishing at the scale of a building but talk less about small gestures of fixing and repair. As secondary or even… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door
3 April 2024
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door3 April 2024
This is the sixth 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. Entering the house the first thing one sees is the entrance door to my… Read More
The Captive Globe
28 March 2024
The Captive Globe28 March 2024
This essay is about a drawing—or rather, about the insight embedded within that drawing and the life it has taken on in the forty-five years since it was made. The drawing in question is The City of the Captive Globe. It was created in 1972, first published in 1978 by… Read More
Protected: Impressions of the exhibition Siza, and some thoughts on Siza’s work
23 October 2024
Protected: Impressions of the exhibition Siza, and some thoughts on Siza’s work23 October 2024
– Sergio Kopinski Ekerman
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
sketchbook exhibition design presentation exhibition