Category: design methodologies
Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen
18 November 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen18 November 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 November 2020
Bramante: Five Dots16 November 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
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory
9 November 2020
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory9 November 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
9 November 2020
Writing Prize 2020: To Measure a Croissant9 November 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 October 2020
Tony Fretton: Tolerance27 October 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 October 2020
Qamutit Home22 October 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 October 2020
S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of13 October 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 September 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Drawing People23 September 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 July 2020
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued30 July 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 July 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 1: Fabrizio Gallanti30 July 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 July 2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28 July 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 July 2020
OMA in Scheveningen22 July 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
2 July 2020
Fresh and Surprised2 July 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
Library of Babel
29 June 2020
Library of Babel29 June 2020
In its most rudimentary form, a LIDAR scan is a simple act of call and response. Thousands of beams of light leave the scanner and receive a measurement based on the distance and intensity (essentially a value of reflectivity) of the objects they collide with. The fascination in these scans… Read More
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza
26 June 2020
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza26 June 2020
Inside the cover of Álvaro Siza’s sketchbooks, there is a whole world: the real and the imagined. In his personal registers of the real, Siza accepts the world as it is. He uses drawing in a playful but productive way, learns when he apprehends, absorbs when drawing. This process of… Read More
Soane: Energy and Frustration
24 June 2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24 June 2020
This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More
James Gowan: The Sheet for the Job
17 June 2020
James Gowan: The Sheet for the Job17 June 2020
The elevation of the Engineering Faculty in Leicester, a building by James Stirling and James Gowan, is in the centre of the tracing paper: a drawing composed of vertical, horizontal and diagonal black lines. A series of height lines and dimensions have been applied effectively, showing that the construction is… Read More
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views
15 June 2020
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views15 June 2020
Rear Views I joined the Stirling office in September 1976, working late hours through the length of four years until my return to Dublin towards the end of 1980. Straight out of college and into my first proper job, the critical years in my formation as an architect. I had… Read More
Staging Brancusi
15 June 2020
Staging Brancusi15 June 2020
– Sarah Handelman and Asli Çiçek
Sarah Handelman: When we started talking about your work in scenography almost a year before, you were in the middle of designing the Brancusi exhibition, which opened last October at BOZAR in Brussels. Since then I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with you about the kinds of stages that… Read More
Ove Arup: Engineering the World
12 June 2020
Ove Arup: Engineering the World12 June 2020
My introduction to the work of Ove Arup, the great Anglo-Danish structural engineer whose firm made both the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris buildable, came over the course of three years as I walked, almost every day, across his Kingsgate foot-bridge in Durham. This is the… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer
11 June 2020
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer11 June 2020
This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans
6 June 2020
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans6 June 2020
– Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song
This drawing, the first in our ‘Naked Plan’ series, overlaps 107 A3 sheets of construction drawings for House P, a private house in Pyeonchang-dong, Seoul (2013-15). Stripped in Autocad of all information, such as image, text and mtext, line weight, saturation and lightness, only the basic lines remain. Through the… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing
13 November 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing13 November 2020
– Marko Skoblar
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
drawing matter writing prize 2020 DMC