Category: commentaries, rants & reflections

Materia 4: Brick

Materia 4: Brick

Gordon Shrigley

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

The City of Design

Emilio Ambasz

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

Beverly Buchanan: Here I am; I’m Still Here

Clara Maria Blasius

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

Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog

Joseph Heffernan

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

Open Letters: Harvard GSD

Paul Mosley

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

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

Hugh Strange

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

Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price

Ana Bonet Miró

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

Queensway, Hong Kong

Sony Devabhaktuni

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

Heinz Isler Model

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

W. R. Lethaby: The Builder’s Art and the Craftsman

Hugh Strange

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

Stendhal’s Autobiography: La Vie de Henri Brulard

Christopher Woodward

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

Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints

Alex Faulkner

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

Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review

Erik Wegerhoff

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

Materia 3: Red Oxide

Gordon Shrigley

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

Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture

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

Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto

Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto

Jaime Tillería Durango

Looking at This was a long time ago/now this is lost, as well as other drawings in Rossi’s unofficial collection of l’architettura assassinata, brings to mind the image of a feast. The scenes are funereal indeed, but they hold a festive aura, as if a celebration had just taken place… Read More

Krier/Culot: Architecture, language and process (1977)

Krier/Culot: Architecture, language and process (1977)

Robert Maxwell

The essay by Robert Maxwell linked below was sent to Drawing Matter by Celia Scott earlier this year. It was first published in Architectural Design, March 1977, as part of a longer feature titled ‘The Role of Ideology’, which discussed the theme through the writing of the architect and historian… Read More

William Burges: Architectural drawing

William Burges: Architectural drawing

Editors

William Burges was elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860 and to its council in 1862. The text reproduced below is the transcript of the paper he delivered upon joining the RIBA. Reproduced from Transactions v.9-11(1858–1861), digitised by the University of Illinois, here.

Edifice

Edifice

Philippa Lewis

These slides were sent to us by Philippa Lewis in response to Gordon Shrigley’s article on render; photographs to expand on the possibilities of the material, some results purposeful and some incidentally beautiful. Gillian Darley and Philippa Lewis started Edifice in around 1987 – a stock library source for the… Read More

W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth

W. R. Lethaby: Architecture, Mysticism and Myth

Hugh Strange

This is the first text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Here we start at the beginning with Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, first published in 1891. In many respects, and certainly in relation to his later output, William Richard Lethaby’s first book,… Read More

Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review

Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review

Peter Carl

The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More

Materia 2: Corrugated Iron

Materia 2: Corrugated Iron

Gordon Shrigley

This text is the second 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. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

Robert Lutyens

We have republished below an extract from Robert Lutyens’ short biography of his father, published in 1942, while Robert was serving in the RAF and two years before Edwin died. The book itself is uncomfortable — an odd mixture of personal portrait, family background, and an attempt to at once… Read More

Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture

Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture

Pierre Riboulet

For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More