Category: design methodologies
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction
15.01.2021
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction15.01.2021
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor series may rightly be called barbaric. ‘Barbarism? Yes indeed,’ writes Walter Benjamin in his 1933 essay, Experience and Poverty. ‘We say this in order to introduce a new positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the… Read More
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic
13.01.2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13.01.2021
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More
The Values of Profiles (1951)
08.01.2021
The Values of Profiles (1951)08.01.2021
Provoked by the assertion of rational architecture, the beginnings of modern non-figurative art coincide in time with the exclusion from the world of living forms of cornices and profiles, the most evidently ‘abstract’ elements of ancient architecture. At least two reasons may be relevant to this singular phenomenon: one is… Read More
Shower at Shatwell Farm
21.12.2020
Shower at Shatwell Farm21.12.2020
Being a designer and adherent of adhocism – speed, economy, improvisation and learning-as-you-go – the materials I use have a strong influence on the outcome of my work. This completely dovetailed with Niall’s brief: to design and build an outdoor toilet and shower for occasional scholars occupying the library at… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up
17.12.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up17.12.2020
Hair, silky, wavy or coiled, somewhere, is felt by us all. It is one of the first things we play with, we shape and mold, unconsciously or artfully. Beginning as a line, slack and tentative, a hair appears as a strike of fine ink. Collected and carefully teased each strand… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque
16.12.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque16.12.2020
– Fabrizio Gallanti and Andrés Jaque
This is the fifth 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 Andrés Jaque, founder of the Office for Political Innovation… Read More
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints
07.12.2020
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints07.12.2020
An intriguing Italian Renaissance drawing from the mid-sixteenth century has recently received critical attention through Drawing Matter. [1] Both the recto and the verso of the paper sheet have an ancient temple plan in perspective in a landscape setting, drawn in brown ink and attributed to the Sangallo circle as… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Smudgy Logic – A Short Story
30.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Smudgy Logic – A Short Story30.11.2020
‘it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.’– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation ‘so you compute with smudgy pictures?’– K-32, Universal Fabricator ‘But what does it do?’ insisted Kei in his eerily smooth, synthetic voice. ‘Are you really asking me what my drawing does?’ Miho’s… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen
18.11.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen18.11.2020
– Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Fabrizio Gallanti and Mauricio Pezo
This is the fourth 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 Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von… Read More
Bramante: Five Dots
16.11.2020
Bramante: Five Dots16.11.2020
The remote past is distant and faded. Original objects and documents that might be used to study it are scarce. They are often uncooperative and most of the time they don’t tell the truth, because they have been reframed by history’s ‘victors’ over the centuries. We must always bear in… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing
13.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing13.11.2020
Similar to many of Rossi’s drawings, the Urban Fragment presents us with a collection of his most cherished forms – a primordial tower, the hand of a saint, and fragments of his own projects, such as the Gallaratese 2 housing complex in Milan and the Cemetery of San Cataldo. In… Read More
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory
09.11.2020
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory09.11.2020
Architects mediate the complexity of the world and their ideas through different instrumental modalities. Whether perspective drawings, proportional relationships, descriptive geometry, material prototypes, scaled models, maquettes or three-dimensional models – models serve the purpose of collecting and indexing information into measurable and rational systems so that the architectural project can… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: To Measure a Croissant
09.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: To Measure a Croissant09.11.2020
‘Through modesty, restraint, and measured discipline, immeasurable delights are made possible.’ James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (1996) C. To measure a croissant, we might: 1.1 Evaluate all ingredients involved: flour, sugar, milk, yeast, salt and butter. 1.2 Count the number of folds the butter and dough must… Read More
Tony Fretton: Tolerance
27.10.2020
Tony Fretton: Tolerance27.10.2020
The following text is an excerpt from AMAG 20 | Tony Fretton Architects. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the editors of the magazine for allowing us to reproduce the text on drawingmatter.org. To order a copy of AMAG 20, click here. Tolerance is a measure of… Read More
Qamutit Home
22.10.2020
Qamutit Home22.10.2020
Qamutit (Inuktitut: ᖃᒧᑏᒃ): an Inuit-designed sled for transport on snow and ice. This conceptual sledge-house exhibits a catalogue of ideas and perceptions regarding the notion of ‘home’, dissolving the boundaries between building and environment and between building and meaning. To regard a house as a home is to regard a… Read More
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of
13.10.2020
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of13.10.2020
– Gerard Carty, Elizabeth Hatz and Fionn O'Leary
In the Autumn of 2019, tutors Elizabeth Hatz and Gerard Carty visited the Drawing Matter archive with their fourth-year students from the School of Architecture and the University of Limerick (SAUL). Below is a record of their visit and its place in the context of the fourth-year studio. Tutors interested… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Drawing People
23.09.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Drawing People23.09.2020
Representations of people are central to our ability to inhabit drawings, to make sense of them, understand their scale, their atmosphere, their character: to exist in the world that the drawing constructs. These images of people are immediately recognisable by all, but are we all able to recognise ourselves amongst… Read More
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued
30.07.2020
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued30.07.2020
When Drawing Matter recently reproduced a preliminary ground plan for Combe House near Gittisham, Devon, by John Soane, I had a moment’s sudden recollection. Ptolemy Dean’s penetrating analysis of this precious if battered sheet of paper – entirely in the astonishingly fluid and energetic hand of the architect – set me to search… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti
30.07.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti30.07.2020
This is the first 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 the drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio writes of his own experience as a tutor and… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28.07.2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28.07.2020
– Stan Allen and José Oubrerie
‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More
OMA in Scheveningen
22.07.2020
OMA in Scheveningen22.07.2020
Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More
Fresh and Surprised
02.07.2020
Fresh and Surprised02.07.2020
Indische Buurt is a suburban area at the eastern edge of Amsterdam that is rich with diverse ethnicities, building ages and spatial experiences. The streets are named after islands and, as a territory historically built upon reclaimed land, there is an overriding feeling of an archipelago: islands that are places… Read More
Architecture at the Edge
13.01.2021
Architecture at the Edge13.01.2021
– Craig Moller and Marco Moro
The following is a conversation between Marco Moro and Craig Moller, New Zealand-born architect and author of the drawing pictured above. Moller made the drawing while in a design studio taught by Mark Wigley in 1985, while the latter was about to finish his doctoral thesis within the newly established… Read More
projection (axonometric isometric) presentation autographicals (editorial project)