Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
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
The City of Design
9 January 2023
The City of Design9 January 2023
– 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
theoretical & imaginary landscape