Category: commentaries, rants & reflections
Balzac architecte (1856)
9 April 2021
Balzac architecte (1856)9 April 2021
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield
31 March 2021
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield31 March 2021
Dear Nicholas, It was wonderful to connect to your seminar and with you. We must catch up soon. I learned a lot from your presentation. And it brought back a flood of memories. Just now I quickly sketched the open plan house my father designed and had built in 1946,… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard
29 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard29 March 2021
This is the tenth 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. In this episode, Guillaume Othenin-Girard discusses his studio at the University of Hong Kong which explored… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26 March 2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26 March 2021
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman
22 March 2021
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman22 March 2021
Laid down facing upwards and spread evenly on a neutral surface, 13 tin toys pose for a shot. Cedric Price’s robot collection – battery powered or clockwork, says the caption – includes a mechanical bird and rabbit, several spaceships, spacemen and robots. Their distinctive features intimate specific names, makers and… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms
19 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms19 March 2021
This is the ninth 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. In this episode Anuj Daga, Assistant Professor at the School of Environment & Architecture, Mumbai, explores… Read More
The Floor Plan of a Room
17 March 2021
The Floor Plan of a Room17 March 2021
Drawn from memory, the floor plan of a room in which two plan chests stand apart like two rectangular islands, plain-faced in plan but each one a tower of uncountable lines, paper upon paper suspended and preserved within the pellucid sleeves of polyester where they lie dormant and entombed as… Read More
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16 March 2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16 March 2021
The following text is an excerpt from George Dodds’ book Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005), an analysis of the historiography and mythography of Mies’s building and its afterlives. The author reminded the Drawing Matter editors of the text, in response to our publication in June 2020 of an… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch
16 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch16 March 2021
This is the eighth 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. In this episode we share Instagram posts by Patrick Lynch in which he describes his experience… Read More
Excerpt: Shadow Places
15 March 2021
Excerpt: Shadow Places15 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Simon Unwin’s book on shadow, in his series Analysing Architecture Notebooks, available here. For 20% off until May 31st 2021, use code KHL20. The piece is illustrated with drawings specially selected by Simon from the Drawing Matter collection. ‘Yea, though I walk through the… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11 March 2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things
8 March 2021
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things8 March 2021
The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More
Make me Hyper-Real: image ethics and the architectural visualisation
5 March 2021
Make me Hyper-Real: image ethics and the architectural visualisation5 March 2021
Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes
1 March 2021
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes1 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS
25 February 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS25 February 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
This is the seventh 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. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt
24 February 2021
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt24 February 2021
Review Three times a week a package arrives in Somerset with another Practice Monograph, and the generous proposal that we might want to add it to the library at Drawing Matter. This is clearly an old story – somewhere we have a copy of one of John Soane’s endless books… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17 February 2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17 February 2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review
16 February 2021
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review16 February 2021
– Editors
Niall Hobhouse writes about The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones. To purchase the book, click here. Green Park, a pair of anecdotes: 1. Queen Caroline – ‘What would it cost, Sir Robert, to close the Park to the public?’ Walpole – ‘May it please your Majesty, but Three Crowns –… Read More
Mother of all drawings
15 February 2021
Mother of all drawings15 February 2021
The very first attempts of humans to express their thoughts can be seen in prehistoric cave paintings. From these rudimentary markings to modern-day coding, the human race has evolved to acquire many skills. Still, none of us are born fully equipped with this skillset; we must repeat this process of learning… Read More
The Problem with Rainbows
12 February 2021
The Problem with Rainbows12 February 2021
Resta sempre insoluto il problema dell’arcobalenoPare que ce ne sia uno dopo la pioggiaE che dall’alto con l’aereoSi veda tutto tornaMa questo metterebbe in crisi tutto quelliChe cercano la pentola d’oro Alle fine dell’arcobaleno C’e sempre un arcobalenoAl di sopra di ogni questione sulla quantitàE qualità dei suoi coloriDopo la pioggiaMa non dopo ogni pioggia… Read More
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy
9 February 2021
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy9 February 2021
John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery
5 February 2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery5 February 2021
A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics
12 April 2021
Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics12 April 2021
– Tom Cookson
It is the unique trait of the section drawing to fragment the singularity of built form, to allow the reading of a building as a series of individual pieces, and thereby delay our innate predilection for gestalt. Much like an erratic (in geology, an erratic is a material moved by geologic forces from… Read More
section drawing matter writing prize 2020 nature DMC