Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Letter of Authorisation to Discuss Late Ottoman Archive Drawings as Operational Images
6 February 2023
Letter of Authorisation to Discuss Late Ottoman Archive Drawings as Operational Images6 February 2023
– Ecem Arslanay and Mina Gürsel Tabanlıoğlu
Southeastern Turkey and Northern Syria have been struck by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 7.5 tremor, killing more than 46,000 people. Ecem and Mina’s local NGO is AHBAP. Please click here if you would like to make a donation. For the past two years, our Writing Prize has… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
3 February 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work3 February 2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?
2 February 2023
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?2 February 2023
Le Corbusier placed particular emphasis on the notion of freedom. In Où en est l’architecture?, he declares: ‘I accept a poem only if it is made of “words in freedom”’. [1] In the same text, Le Corbusier describes his conception of art as ‘individual manifestation of freedom’. [2] In Sur… Read More
Historic England Image Archive
23 January 2023
Historic England Image Archive23 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio
18 January 2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18 January 2023
This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More
The Sasada Lab
16 January 2023
The Sasada Lab16 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education
13 January 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education13 January 2023
This is the fourth text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. The building sites of London in the late nineteenth century desperately lacked adequate skills, and this need was being addressed neither on the job nor through appropriate training. The first prospectus of… Read More
Materia 4: Brick
10 January 2023
Materia 4: Brick10 January 2023
This text is the fourth in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Coarse rectangular lumps of clay mixed with straw and water, small enough to be carried in one or two hands, are laid… Read More
The City of Design
9 January 2023
The City of Design9 January 2023
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here
15 December 2022
Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here15 December 2022
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog
7 December 2022
Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog7 December 2022
Every hectare of drained peatland emits two tonnes of carbon a year. Known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but they store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. Cutting turf for fuel has been practiced for centuries, and communities have… Read More
Open Letters: Harvard GSD
2 December 2022
Open Letters: Harvard GSD2 December 2022
Drawing Matter has been enjoying Open Letters, published bi-weekly by Harvard University Graduate School Of Design, from the start. In part, this is because our own publishing initiative began at much at the same time – now ten years ago – and proceeds at the same pace, and with a little of the… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople
28 November 2022
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople28 November 2022
This is the third text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. William Lethaby’s second book, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, published in 1894, could hardly have started on its subject more emphatically, ‘Sancta Sophia is the most… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21 November 2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21 November 2022
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
Queensway, Hong Kong
4 November 2022
Queensway, Hong Kong4 November 2022
What I knew of Hong Kong before I moved here came from film and photography. It was a dense, post-modern city that in earlier decades had been characterised by its economic success. Since the turn of the century, the city has been pummelled by shocks and anxieties. Life in Hong… Read More
Heinz Isler Model
2 November 2022
Heinz Isler Model2 November 2022
– John Chilton and Paul Shepherd
This text was written by Paul Shepherd. The interjections, in italic, are additions by his friend and Heinz Isler expert John Chilton. If you go down to the woods today… Since our son was away on Scout camp all weekend, my plans for Sunday involved a much-needed lie-in and an… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman
24 October 2022
W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman24 October 2022
This is the second text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Dissatisfied with his first book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, a year later William Lethaby indicated a significant shift in thinking with the essay, ‘The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman’. The text… Read More
Stendhal’s Autobiography: La Vie de Henri Brulard
14 October 2022
Stendhal’s Autobiography: La Vie de Henri Brulard14 October 2022
Soft childish snow swirled on the sidewalk in New York. Lecture given, Christmas presents bought, two hours before the bus to Newark. Outside a bookstore a stall of paperbacks to clear, and there it is, the New York Review of Books’ paperback edition of La Vie du Henri Brulard, Stendhal’s autobiography of… Read More
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints
12 October 2022
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints12 October 2022
One of the great enigmas of ukiyo-e – Japanese woodblock prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is the anachronistic intrusion of Western drawing into an apparently closed world; that the sophisticated culture of Edo (now modern Tokyo) seemingly closed off its borders since the Middle Ages. The widespread… Read More
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review
10 October 2022
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review10 October 2022
There is a strange moment in the second room of the exhibition, where all kinds of great works are hung on the walls to admire, organised around a central display of plastic and aluminium furniture: a collage of a car hovering like the golden calf amidst a crazed crowd; a… Read More
Materia 3: Red Oxide
30 September 2022
Materia 3: Red Oxide30 September 2022
This text is the third in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The first and second texts in the series, on render and corrugated iron, can be read here. Architects are subsumed within… Read More
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture
23 September 2022
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture23 September 2022
– Editors
These three sketches are from a sketchbook that Robert Maxwell used while studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1944. They are reproduced here to mark the publication of Robert Maxwell: the Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture, edited by Celia Scott, which is now available through Drawing… Read More
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff
17 February 2023
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff17 February 2023
– Nicholas Olsberg
This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More
land DMC landscape