Category: design methodologies
Drawing Without Erasing
21.10.2024
Drawing Without Erasing21.10.2024
The following text first appeared in Drawing without Erasing and Other Essays, by Flores & Prats (Barcelona: Puente editores, 2023), 16-23. Not so long ago, a journalist interviewed us for the British magazine Architecture Today, and the resulting article was called ‘Dirty Drawings’. This suggestive title might bring to mind a… Read More
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter
12.09.2024
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter12.09.2024
– Editors and Chloé Parent
Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… Read More
Suddenly This View
05.09.2024
Suddenly This View05.09.2024
Suddenly This View begun as a series of architectural models and evolved into a collection of model photography. It is an ongoing project investigating everyday spaces, exploring how architectural models and their derivative creations can be used to convey spatial narratives. The subjects of Suddenly This View are everyday buildings… Read More
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project
29.08.2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project29.08.2024
This is the fourth post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
26.08.2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas26.08.2024
– Erin Besler, Marshall Brown, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
Drawings as Cosmovisions
12.08.2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12.08.2024
My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate
05.08.2024
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate05.08.2024
Many people reach a point in their lives at which they realise that they should protest the status quo. Some people make the realisation but remain frustrated, stuck, or blocked from enacting the necessary change. How do we face, name, and act according to our most fundamental realisations and what… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
25.07.2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas25.07.2024
– Darell Wayne Fields, Anda French, Tessa Kelly, Paul Lewis and Michael Meredith
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15.07.2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15.07.2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade
28.06.2024
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade28.06.2024
This is the third post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
27.06.2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas27.06.2024
– Stan Allen, Beatriz Colomina, Michael Meredith, Jesse Reiser and Mark Wigley
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
On the Street
14.06.2024
On the Street14.06.2024
The Drawing Matter editors have been enjoying Eddie Heathcote’s On the Street: In-Between Architecture and wanted to share the following short extracts. Draining Against the wall under the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome is a strange object, looking a little like a pancake with… Read More
Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto
10.06.2024
Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto10.06.2024
The design of Casa a Diacceto responds to the principle of ‘discontinuity’ theorised by Lapo Binazzi at the beginning of the 1970s: architecture can only be thought of and realised in fragments and pieces, there is no longer a coherent unity. The pieces are never invented, but are taken from… Read More
DMJ – Burning Drawing
06.06.2024
DMJ – Burning Drawing06.06.2024
This article documents a series of material studies of prepared surfaces that use laser cutters as instruments of drawing—and, at times, of weathering. They are part of a study that explores, through texts and images, the role that islands have played as topoi of imagination and experimentation. I begin these island stories… Read More
The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition
03.06.2024
The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition03.06.2024
The GSD Sketching Group brings together the Harvard Graduate School of Design community to explore and sketch their surroundings. This student group was founded in February 2022 by Olivia Champ Tremml and myself, with the goal of dignifying hand drawing within the design professions and to strengthen its relevance in… Read More
Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra
20.05.2024
Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra20.05.2024
The Alhambra architectural models reflect the circumstances in which they were created, during the last years of the Romantic movement, when artists and patrons were fascinated by the diffuse idea of the ‘Orient’, somewhat embodied by the Alhambra. This part-myth, part-real palace was the ultimate destination for Romantic travellers and… Read More
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture
06.05.2024
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture06.05.2024
What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?
26.04.2024
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?26.04.2024
James Stirling’s presentation drawing from 1957 to a faculty of engineers might seem strangely familiar to contemporary architects. A section of a box, showing the structure, services, and how people might dwell inside—it almost anticipates the prefabricated modular construction architects are now being asked to design. Only a few years… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19.04.2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19.04.2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)
15.04.2024
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)15.04.2024
Snap, crackle, pop. Oh, that horrible sound of unravelling a roll of architectural drawings on old dried-up tracing paper from the nineteenth century. Slowly unfurling the brown brittle sheet, it cracks and shatters, little bits drop off in flakes, littering the table and floor like confetti. The experience feels like… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
18.03.2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands18.03.2024
The following text is the fifth and final in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have… Read More
The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour
14.03.2024
The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour14.03.2024
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. A… Read More
Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables
06.03.2024
Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables06.03.2024
The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Despite predictions of the… Read More
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School
06.09.2024
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School06.09.2024
– Editors
The Architecture Summer School took place over five days in mid-August, for the first time hosted in London at Drawing Room in Bermondsey SE1. Now in its eight year, the programme is open to any student aged 15 and above who has an ambition to study architecture, with six young… Read More
architectural drawing summer school