Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric
17.11.2020
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric17.11.2020
One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing
13.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing13.11.2020
Similar to many of Rossi’s drawings, the Urban Fragment presents us with a collection of his most cherished forms – a primordial tower, the hand of a saint, and fragments of his own projects, such as the Gallaratese 2 housing complex in Milan and the Cemetery of San Cataldo. In… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler
12.11.2020
Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler12.11.2020
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. Friedrich… Read More
Tree Speech
07.11.2020
Tree Speech07.11.2020
The following text is the fourth of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More
Trees Push Back
03.11.2020
Trees Push Back03.11.2020
The following text is the third of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Elizabeth Hatz on Frank Lloyd Wright
29.10.2020
Startha Éagsula: Elizabeth Hatz on Frank Lloyd Wright29.10.2020
a vanished gardenthe oriental plan eclipses an obsession with circlesall spaces on their way to evaporateany momentthe terrible weight of void implodes into a dome turned sidewayson its way down, breast-feeding earthmidway of life – garden of deathlight words lift like invisible balloonsthe perspective of cantilevered canopies is relentlessin heavy… Read More
Tony Fretton: Tolerance
27.10.2020
Tony Fretton: Tolerance27.10.2020
The following text is an excerpt from AMAG 20 | Tony Fretton Architects. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the editors of the magazine for allowing us to reproduce the text on drawingmatter.org. To order a copy of AMAG 20, click here. Tolerance is a measure of… Read More
Trees Move In
22.10.2020
Trees Move In22.10.2020
The following text is the second of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha
20.10.2020
Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha20.10.2020
– 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
Palladio’s Lines
15.10.2020
Palladio’s Lines15.10.2020
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
13.10.2020
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall13.10.2020
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
13.10.2020
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of13.10.2020
– Gerard Carty, Elizabeth Hatz 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
29.09.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War29.09.2020
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: Andrew Clancy
28.09.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 3: Andrew Clancy28.09.2020
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
23.09.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Drawing People23.09.2020
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
31.08.2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31.08.2020
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
30.07.2020
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued30.07.2020
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: Fabrizio Gallanti
30.07.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti30.07.2020
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
28.07.2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28.07.2020
– 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
OMA in Scheveningen
22.07.2020
OMA in Scheveningen22.07.2020
Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More
A Glasgow Effect
17.07.2020
A Glasgow Effect17.07.2020
I draw and make dens to counter the weather of Scotland and the urban dislocation that I experienced from growing up in Glasgow, a city that suffered disproportionately from devastating post-war planning policy and the imposition of industrial modern architecture. The consequences of this are described by the medical term… Read More
Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin
19.11.2020
Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin19.11.2020
– David Leech
The colourful ink and pencil drawing of Barthélemy Enfantin seeks to establish a set of rules for a new open metropolis. Without site, set out in all axes, and with the edges of the drawing alluding to a non-determined repetition, it was possibly drawn for continuous reuse and translation. Like… Read More
plan urban form alternative histories (project) DMC