Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting

Protected: Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Protected: Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West

E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West

Matt Page

From this drawing it would seem unlikely that the side wall at its centre would one day be photographed thousands of times, and attract the interest of people from all over the world. Here, it appears unremarkable, especially when compared to the gutsy brick detailing and gothic flourishes of the… Read More

Montano – Don’t speak about me

Montano – Don’t speak about me

Cammy Brothers

Dear Niall, Before I forget, I wanted to send you the transcription from the Montano sheet. You can post it as my little discovery. Non dir di me se su di me non sai senza di te che poi di me dirai?Non fare ad aloro quello che a te non piace … Read More

Brunel’s Camera Lucida: A Closer Look

Brunel’s Camera Lucida: A Closer Look

Pablo Garcia

A camera lucida is a 19th-century drawing aid. When you look into the eyepiece, you see a ghost image of your subject overlaid onto your paper. Since you can see your hand holding your pencil with your subject superimposed, you can trace directly from real life. Invented in 1807, before… Read More

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Matt Page

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was born in Nassau, Bahamas, and educated in Scotland from the age of six. He briefly studied at the Glasgow School of Art and joined the British Army in 1942. After the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd while producing paintings, short plays and stories. He… Read More

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Raffael Baur and Patricia Guaita

The following text recounts the week-long drawing workshop held at Shatwell Farm in August 2024. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read invited expert Sergio Ekerman’s account of the two lectures he delivered throughout the week, click here. The 2024 ENAC Summer Workshop at… Read More

Two lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Two lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman

The following text is a brief reflection on two lectures delivered at Shatwell Farm in August 2024 as part of the ENAC EPFL Drawing Research Platform. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read an account of the week, click here. The two lectures at… Read More

Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition at the Belvedere 21

Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition at the Belvedere 21

Emerald Wise

I arrive at the Belvedere 21 after visiting Walter Pichler’s famous farmhouse in Sankt Martin an der Raab, only a few days prior—it is a stiflingly hot day in Vienna and for some reason, I have chosen to walk. I arrive at the Belvedere 21 to attend the Visionary Spaces exhibition that showcases some of Walter Pichler’s works in… Read More

Impressions of the Siza exhibition

Impressions of the Siza exhibition

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman

When I was an architecture exchange student at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto (FAUP), between 2000 and 2001, there was a legend you could knock at Álvaro Siza Vieira’s office door and end up working there as an intern—the equivalent of walking into Mount Olympus to collaborate with… Read More

Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette

Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette

Ana Bonet Miró

The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More

On origins and originality

On origins and originality

Niall Hobhouse

The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

Neil Bingham

Instruments of Building in Ancient Rome Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, portrays being an architect (architectus) in ancient Rome as a daunting task. The knowledge of the architect, he notes, must encompass the understanding of geometry, engineering, optics, history, philosophy, astronomy, and even music and medicine. At a… Read More

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. Premiered at this year’s La Biennale di Venezia, was Andres Veiel’s documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director known for Olympia (1936) and Triumph des Willens (1935). Framed through archival material Veil’s Riefenstahl (2024) demonstrates how her work was inextricably linked to… Read More

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Erin McKellar

At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Nicholas Olsberg

This post concludes Nicholas Olsberg’s series on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, the text of which is included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Sounding corridors’: entry and sequence The driveway brings us into a… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2

Nicholas Olsberg

This post continues with the second part of Nicholas Olsberg’s text on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024.   ‘Cycles of the human tale’: the library The elevation of the… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Nicholas Olsberg

William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024.  Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

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

DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida

DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida

Philip Steadman

In the Drawing Matter collection there is a camera lucida that belonged to Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) (Figs 1–4,6).[1] The camera lucida is an instrument for drawing from life, patented in 1806 by the versatile English chemist and physicist William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828).[2] The term camera lucida (‘well-lit room’) is… Read More

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

James Dunbar and Editors

Adolfo Natalini (1941–2020) was an Italian architect. A member of the ‘School of Pistoia’ Pop Art group in the early 1960s, Natalini combined his Pop aesthetic with critique and irony in his thesis work at the University of Florence School of Architecture, graduating in 1966.[1] Soon after, he co-founded Superstudio… Read More

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2

Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson

This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More

Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine

Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine

Jeremy Peacock

Leaving the Architectural Association and starting at Ahrends Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1978 was a complete revelation to me. Here, instead of the layers of smudged graphite used to illustrate abstract drawings—as promoted by Dalibor Vesely for instance—graphite powder from your rotary pencil sharpener was used to shade the… Read More

Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-1939

Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-1939

Otto Saumarez Smith

When the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was asked to draw up an inventory of interwar buildings that deserved to be placed on the Statutory List, the so-called ‘Pevsner 50’ that resulted was almost entirely composed of the whitest of white modernist buildings. Similarly, John Summerson argued that the only thing… Read More