Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Drawing Powers 3: The Drawing in the Object
02.11.2021
Drawing Powers 3: The Drawing in the Object02.11.2021
This text is the third in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. It was the drawing that led me to architecture,… Read More
Drawing Powers 4: The Drawing-object
02.11.2021
Drawing Powers 4: The Drawing-object02.11.2021
This text is the fourth in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. After I have developed a feel for the programme,… Read More
Drawing Powers: Conclusions
02.11.2021
Drawing Powers: Conclusions02.11.2021
This text is the conclusion to a series of essays in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. What surprises me most in architecture, as in other… Read More
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)
16.09.2021
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)16.09.2021
The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More
Capitol or Capital?
02.09.2021
Capitol or Capital?02.09.2021
From the Editors: 1. We have been re-reading Martin Pawley’s collected essays. Each comes as a rich reminder that here was the contrarian voice of the 1970s and 80s, whose commentary – on architecture, architects and contemporary society – ought to be replayed to readers now on a continuous, salutary,… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock
01.09.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock01.09.2021
– Job Floris and Fabrizio Gallanti
This is the seventeenth 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. Here, Fabrizio interviews Job Floris, co-founder of Mondanock, about their teaching studios at the EFPL and Harvard… Read More
The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan
05.08.2021
The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan05.08.2021
The interesting note by Neil Jackson tying Gowan and his Isle of Wight House to the bi-nuclear plans of Breuer and then to Craig Ellwood’s Hillsborough House, reminds me of Stirling’s own early interest in Breuer, whose Connecticut work he saw during his 1948 internship in New York during his… Read More
Sketches from Algiers
02.08.2021
Sketches from Algiers02.08.2021
In October 1975 I returned to Cambridge to complete my architecture course. I had spent my year out in London with MacCormac and Jamieson, an exciting time as it was early days for this young practice and I was one of their very first assistants. In fact, I nearly didn’t… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas
28.07.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas28.07.2021
This is the sixteenth 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. Here, Luis Callejas (LCLA OFFICE) discusses his teaching studios at the Yale School of Architecture and the… Read More
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive
26.07.2021
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive26.07.2021
Whoever decides to study the conditions of a practice of imagining architecture through/as line will, I am afraid, be left in despair. Once the theatrical mask of line’s incontrovertible instrumentality is seen to slip, line’s solidity, its all too evident honesty as a simple mimetic tool, turns up by and… Read More
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House
25.07.2021
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House25.07.2021
I find myself lost in the woods, then reorientated, guided by the centralised chimney. Standing dead centre in front of the gate lodge, my gaze is lifted to the space between chimney and sky, between foreground or background. A cloud of white smoke disguises itself as an English cloud, passing… Read More
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House
21.07.2021
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House21.07.2021
– James Gowan, J. M. Richards, Laurent Stalder, James Stirling and Ellis Woodman
This first impetus for this article was provided by Laurent Stalder’s discussion of the sectional perspective drawing for the Isle of Wight house, reproduced here, which led us to J. M. Richards’ seminal essay, and then onward through the literature. In addition, we asked the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Canadian… Read More
Letter to the Editors: What I See in Drawings Today…
05.07.2021
Letter to the Editors: What I See in Drawings Today…05.07.2021
All the discussions, observations or decisions, concerning any of the projects of Aldo Rossi, by clients, city mayors, commissions or whoever had to approve or express a comment, were always made over his first sketch. There you had everything, the building – or whatever was the project for – was… Read More
Keeping a Notebook
24.06.2021
Keeping a Notebook24.06.2021
Looking into other people’s notebooks is to witness moments of creative exploration and growth. A graphic facility in others can provoke envy, but being given access into someone else’s mind and seeing where it wanders is always stimulating. As the examples published by Drawing Matter illustrate, architects’ notebooks harbour many… Read More
Architectural Drawing (1983)
22.06.2021
Architectural Drawing (1983)22.06.2021
This essay was first published in the catalogue for Drawings by Architects (25 February – 3 April 1983), held at the ICA in London. A period piece, for sure, the text sits at the cusp of changing attitudes to the display and value attributed to architect’s drawings. In recent years… Read More
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work
09.06.2021
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work09.06.2021
All drawings contain traces of all previously drawn mediations. [1] All drawings are silent acts of memorialising (by employing inter-subjective readings of iconography, lineage, parody, reverie and reflexivity) what has been drawn before, or thought to have been so, or simply, what has been, consciously misplaced. [2] The text above… Read More
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989
02.06.2021
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 198902.06.2021
In his voyage to Samos in the Summer of 1989 Aldo Rossi gathered a collection of fragments in accordance with a Palladian education. The image repeats itself, following what Johns had written in 1984: ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two:… Read More
I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day
31.05.2021
I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day31.05.2021
With a circumference of approximately 10cm, I compress the majestic mountain. I pressure it between my fingers and the board and I slice. The contours fall on the board; in a matter of minutes, they will turn once more into a fragrant and luminous mountain. The emotional downpour induced by… Read More
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt
26.05.2021
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt26.05.2021
Review By preserving the trees on the site within his pavilion in the Giardini, Sverre Fehn offered Venice an insight into a unique Nordic sensitivity towards nature and the environment. He tempered the harsh Mediterranean sun to evoke the horizontal light of the Baltic through a spectacularly innovative technical design… Read More
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy
19.05.2021
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy19.05.2021
The following texts are excerpted from Gordon Shrigley, Insignificance: A short discourse on the physical and ideational economy of line within architectural representation (Solitude Editions, 1998). Now, twenty years after Insignificance was first published, Gordon Shrigley has revisited the publication for a series of postings on Drawing Matter. Each of these posts connect… Read More
Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva
19.05.2021
Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva19.05.2021
For the curious visitor that approaches the historic remains of the Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome, it will take a lot of effort to contextualize the building as it could have once been. That which before had allowed for a gentle processional approach to the ruin has now been… Read More
Drawing Powers 2: The Object in the Drawing
02.11.2021
Drawing Powers 2: The Object in the Drawing02.11.2021
– Fernando Poeiras
This text is the second in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. First, I consider drawing as an adequate medium… Read More
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