Category: design methodologies

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Ying Xuan Chian

Prologue: Panic! at K’s office Location: K’s office, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower Characters: Tutor: K (calm, knowing) Student: Me (facing an existential crisis, encountering a creative block, second-year hysteria… you get the idea) Brief: To design a library  I am fascinated by the heterogeneity of our experience of built… Read More

Disney: The Architecture of Staged Realities

Disney: The Architecture of Staged Realities

Saskia van Stein

‘Project Life Cycle’ provides a brief look into the complex work behind the scenes of a Walt Disney Company production. It is a meticulous formalisation that maps the industrial-organisational apparatus of the life cycle of a Disney project. The creative process is abstracted into a sequence of decisions, a neatly… Read More

Cosmos Street Revisited

Cosmos Street Revisited

Peter Wilson

This response relates to a text by Oscar Binder and Nicholas Podlanha published by Drawing Matter in July 2021, which described and reconstructed (badly) a lost project by the deceased architect James Clark. In fact I am James Clark (decidedly not dead) and the project parodied in this less than… Read More

Superstudio: Finding the Horizon

Superstudio: Finding the Horizon

Gian Piero Frassinelli

Until not too long ago, I would be asked to explain to youngsters accustomed to digital graphics how I used to make montages. I felt like an archaeologist, explaining how, in the Palaeolithic era, Neanderthals used to make their tools.  Across several workshops, I have realised that the techniques today… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Luis Callejas

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

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Luca Galofaro

Our vision is simultaneously determined by the (past) historical structure of the work and by the present structure of the gaze that examines it, in which the accumulated glimpses of history often continue to operate.– Daniel Arasse Writing a postcard is the simplest thing in the world. Among other things,… Read More

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

Frank Bauer

Along with his Do Hit Chair (2000), a pristine stainless steel box measuring 1000 x 700 x 750 mm, Dutch-born designer Marijn van der Poll supplies a sledgehammer. In an act of brute physical force he requires the user to expressively sculpt his own seating morphology, not only allowing but… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Grace Mortlock and David Neustein

This is the fifthteenth 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 talks to Grace Mortlock and David Neustein of the Sydney-based practice Other Architects… Read More

Keeping a Notebook

Keeping a Notebook

Simon Unwin

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

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Alfredo Thiermann

This is the fourteenth 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, Alfredo Thiermann reflects on his experience of drawing during a pandemic, in both… Read More

The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion

The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion

Stacey Lewis

Peter Märkli’s hand-drawn section of the ancient monument Hagia Sophia (532–7) is part of a working process developed alongside his design work. The output is a collection of investigative drawings that document sacred archetypal buildings, and articulate his resolved thesis that ‘architecture has a language’.   The drawing illustrates a system… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Tatiana Bilbao and Fabrizio Gallanti

This is the thirteenth 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 Tatiana Bilbao about her teaching at Yale School of Architecture and… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

Peter Wilson

Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Elizabeth Hatz

This is the twelfth 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, Elizabeth Hatz discusses her personal experience of the pandemic and its consequences for… Read More

Fernand Pouillon’s Survey of the Abbey of Le Thoronet

Fernand Pouillon’s Survey of the Abbey of Le Thoronet

Oscar Mather

The following text by Oscar Mather is excerpted from Issue 6 of the Journal of Civic Architecture, edited by Patrick Lynch: https://www.canalsidepress.com/joca-issue-6/. Fernand Pouillon insisted throughout his life that his sole concern in architecture was construction, and he described himself as a maître d’œuvre, in a sense closest to the… Read More

Hans Hollein’s Immunological City

Hans Hollein’s Immunological City

Dhruv Mehta

Hans Hollein’s city structures look awry to someone familiar with his retail work. In the time that these drawings were made, Hollein completed his UC Berkeley degree, travelled across the USA, and did an exhibition with Walter Pichler in Austria. His most influential visit was to the Native American pueblos.… Read More

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Ciaran Scannell

The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More

Medieval Masons and Tracing-floors

Medieval Masons and Tracing-floors

Jennifer Smith

The tracing-floors of York Minster offer a rare glimpse into the relationship between drawing and the Cathedral, the most iconic monument to medieval Gothic. Tucked away into the loft of a small vestibule connecting the North Transept to the Chapter House, the Mason’s Lodge, as it is known, is one… Read More

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Richard Hall

Hans van der Heijden is an Amsterdam-based architect. He co-founded biq in 1994 with Rick Wessels before establishing his own office, Hans van der Heijden Architect, in 2014. During this timeframe he has developed a recognisable and idiosyncratic drawing repertoire, the origins of which can be traced back to his… Read More

Open Wide / Wide Open

Open Wide / Wide Open

Angharad Davies

We started with six words: a short-term dwelling for an artist then added:   with a child What adaptations have you made to your domestic space since having a child? / What adaptations have you made to your work space since having a child? / How / When / Where do… Read More

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Editors

The following quotations are from ‘Mein Stoff für Fassaden (My Facade Material)’, a lecture delivered online by Peter Märkli to open a series of five talks for the Architecture Foundation. The quotations are presented here in a loose fashion, some treated as aphorisms about design, others illustrated with drawings from… Read More

Physical & Digital Drawing

Physical & Digital Drawing

Reuben Roberts

When we use a Computer Aided Design (CAD) programme we invoke the act of drawing as we draw the mouse around on the desk. The cursor is drawn across the screen, albeit with a level of discontinuity as the lines of code convert the signals of the optical sensor into… Read More

Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics

Shaping Landscape: Schinkel and Erratics

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

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts

Helen Thomas

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