Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Sol LeWitt: Non-visual Structures
25.11.2024
Sol LeWitt: Non-visual Structures25.11.2024
One of the most particular of LeWitt’s preoccupations is his long-standing desire to infer the existence of unseen or interior facts or objects. The concept of encasing in a block of cement the Cellini cup or the Empire State Building runs counter to the unsecretive quality of his open frameworks,… Read More
José Oubrerie, In Memoriam
21.11.2024
José Oubrerie, In Memoriam21.11.2024
Very few contemporary buildings take nearly 50 years to be finished. Just this fact tells us a lot about the intensity, resilience, passion and patience of José Oubrerie, who passed away on March 10th, at 91. Aged only 27 when joining the atelier Le Corbusier in 1959, the church of… Read More
PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an Ideo-aesthetic Technique
07.11.2024
PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an Ideo-aesthetic Technique07.11.2024
It was 2005, a moment of crescent belief in technical progress and modernity prior to the upcoming financial crisis that took place two years later. The early 2000s saw the progressive implementation of photorealistic modes of architectural representation through which firms were able to intensify the instrumentalisation of spatial design.… Read More
L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney
28.10.2024
L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney28.10.2024
Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More
Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World
11.10.2024
Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World11.10.2024
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
07.10.2024
Streetscapes: Bath07.10.2024
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
27.09.2024
2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models27.09.2024
– 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
16.09.2024
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s16.09.2024
– 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
06.09.2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect
02.09.2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect02.09.2024
– 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
19.08.2024
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows19.08.2024
– 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
09.08.2024
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge09.08.2024
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
05.08.2024
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate05.08.2024
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
22.07.2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 222.07.2024
– 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
18.07.2024
Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine18.07.2024
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
15.07.2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15.07.2024
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
08.07.2024
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-193908.07.2024
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
01.07.2024
Shatwell Farm: Covering Over, Bagging Up, Tying Down01.07.2024
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
20.06.2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 120.06.2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversation 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
09.05.2024
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action09.05.2024
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
01.05.2024
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture01.05.2024
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
Impressions of the Siza Exhibition
02.12.2024
Impressions of the Siza Exhibition02.12.2024
– Sergio Kopinski Ekerman
When I was an architecture exchange student at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto (FAUP), between 2000 and 2001, there was a legend you could knock at Álvaro Siza Vieira’s office door and end up working there as an intern—the equivalent of walking into Mount Olympus to collaborate with… Read More
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