Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
Protected: Vaucher’s shadows
12.04.2026
Protected: Vaucher’s shadows12.04.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Wedging a Shrine
10.04.2026
Wedging a Shrine10.04.2026
This drawing by an unknown author can be appreciated from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it depicts a jinja, a Japanese Shinto shrine. From a historical point of view, the image can be read as an ezu—an illustrated map from the late Edo period (mid-nineteenth century)—featuring premodern calligraphy and the… Read More
Ellis Woodman on James Gowan’s Sketchbooks (Video)
09.04.2026
Ellis Woodman on James Gowan’s Sketchbooks (Video)09.04.2026
In this short film, Ellis Woodman takes us through four sketchbooks used by the Scottish architect James Gowan (1923–2015). The sketchbooks cover three decades of Gowan’s ideas, observations, and designs. As Ellis describes, they are very broad in their range and content; while some work through design problems, others are… Read More
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural
30.03.2026
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural30.03.2026
Drawing Matter holds a large number of drawings, prints and other materials relating to a project for an office building in Kansas City designed by Louis Kahn. The project was one of the last that the architect worked on before his death in 1974, and many of the drawings carry… Read More
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio
26.03.2026
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio26.03.2026
The Drawing Matter collection holds around 70 objects that speak to Italy’s architectural evolution in the early twentieth century. It should be noted that this period was characterised by tremendous stylistic diversity, with movements and groups—often unhappily—coexisting and shifting, ultimately culminating in the dominance of the Stile Littorio. At the… Read More
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House
13.03.2026
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House13.03.2026
The sole drawing by Sergei Eisenstein in the Drawing Matter archive is a set design for a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) from 1922. It is a rare, interdisciplinary confluence of a socialist Irish playwright (Shaw), a Russian filmmaker and theorist (Eisenstein), and a radical theatre maker… Read More
Shadowed plans
11.03.2026
Shadowed plans11.03.2026
Drawing Matter holds in its collection a plan by Superstudio architects Carlo Chiappi and Adolfo Natalini for the 1967 competition for the restoration of the Fortezza da Basso—a 16th-century fort in Florence—and its transformation into a National Centre for Arts and Crafts.[1] The drawing combines traditional plan-making techniques with remarkable… Read More
Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza
24.02.2026
Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza24.02.2026
– Editors
At Drawing Matter, I had long hoped that we could play some part in the transition of the Álvaro Siza archive from his personal holdings to the public realm. Ten years ago, over many meetings with Siza, Nicholas Olsberg and I had agreed that the collection at Drawing Matter might… Read More
James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield
12.02.2026
James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield12.02.2026
– Vera Okodugha and Ana Francisco Sutherland
To mark the publication of Ana Francisco Sutherland’s remarkable compendium of the modern buildings of Greenwich and Blackheath, this post is presented as a ‘project scrapbook’ that traces two of James Gowan’s social housing projects, Trafalgar Road, London, built between 1964 and 1968, and East Hanningfield, Essex, finished in 1978.… Read More
‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter
05.02.2026
‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter05.02.2026
– Charles Batach, Fabrizio Gallanti, Youssef Khobaiz, Marina Lathouri, Katerina Papanikolopoulos, Roberto Rodriguez and Freny Shah
This article tries to convey the collective exhilaration of a week-long seminar with Drawing Matter: five days, four writing exercises based on the analysis, observation and writing of archival and graphic material from the Drawing Matter Collection. Since 2014, the History and Critical Thinking postgraduate programme at the Architectural Association… Read More
Photographing Drawings
27.01.2026
Photographing Drawings27.01.2026
At Drawing Matter, we have a rule that when a new object enters the collection, it must be photographed and published within a month. With our capable photographer and her fancy equipment still in Somerset, we needed to find other ways of documenting new additions to the collection. We tried… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop
15.01.2026
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop15.01.2026
– Raffael Baur, Patricia Guaita and Matthew Wells
For a fourth year, Drawing Matter hosted students from ENAC EPFL for a week-long workshop on survey drawings—this time not in a Somerset farmyard, but in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 400 yards east of the archive. The workshop was organised by Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur in collaboration with Drawing Matter,… Read More
Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer
05.01.2026
Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer05.01.2026
Here, Mark Dorrian examines the theoretical history of the shadow and its evolving role in architectural drawing. The text acts as a word-and-image primer for the third colloquium event, jointly hosted by the RIBA and V&A Drawings Collections, and Drawing Matter, which will take place later this month—a day of… Read More
DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight
18.12.2025
DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight18.12.2025
Architectural stories, almost by definition, construct narratives combining image and text. It is these combinations of the visual and the verbal that make architectural stories particularly compelling and memorable. ‘The Story of the Pool’ (1976) by Rem Koolhaas is a case in point. The script, written by Koolhaas, tells of… Read More
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid
15.12.2025
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid15.12.2025
– Editors
Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. After studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1968 to 1971, she moved to London in 1972, where she studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA). It was here that her work began to reference the Russian avant-garde,… Read More
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)
24.11.2025
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)24.11.2025
– Editors
On Friday 7 November, Drawing Matter welcomed architects Tony Fretton and Benjamin Machin to the archive for a conversation to open the exhibition ‘Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important’. Anchored by seven ‘artefacts’ now in the Drawing Matter Collection, the conversation explores the roles of drawings, photography, and sketchbooks… Read More
Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks (Video)
20.11.2025
Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks (Video) 20.11.2025
The sketchbook is your loyal private companion, your eyewitness and accomplice on voyeuristic escapes and inquisitive journeys. It is a brain in your hand, mirroring even subconscious registrations, only discovered afterwards, as you flick through the pages, absent-mindedly. You remember—much has already entered you, through the hand. I cry when… Read More
Collection Guide: The Viennese School
18.11.2025
Collection Guide: The Viennese School18.11.2025
Drawing Matter’s collection of Viennese drawings from the 19th and early 20th century includes works by Franz Jakob Kreuter, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Schönthal, Emil Hoppe, and Friedrich Ohmann, among others. It was a time of great technological advance, social upheaval, cultural revolt, and changing attitudes to design. Considered as a group, the… Read More
Collection Guide: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati
27.10.2025
Collection Guide: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati27.10.2025
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Francesco Fiammenghi
To probe the long and multifaceted career of Andrea Branzi (1938–2023), one must first turn to his formative years at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence in the early 1960s. At the time, the Florence School became the incubator of several of Italy’s postwar avant-garde groups, including… Read More
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors
23.10.2025
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors23.10.2025
We are thankful to Ross Anderson, who identified these statements Lucien Hervé made when interviewed by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, and which are pertinent to this contact sheet in the Drawing Matter Collection: ‘When Le Corbusier received me in his office one day, we talked for a long time; I remember that he… Read More
Collection Guide: William Butterfield
25.09.2025
Collection Guide: William Butterfield25.09.2025
William Butterfield was a British architect who trained first as a builder’s apprentice and then as an architect in offices at London and Worcester before opening his own London studio in 1838, continuing in full practice until 1886, and then on a limited scale through to 1897. He was the… Read More
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato (Video)
01.09.2025
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato (Video)01.09.2025
From April to July, Maristella Casciato was Drawing Matter’s Visiting Scholar—our first in London. During her time in the archive, she made new discoveries and started many stimulating conversations. Among other things, she closely studied Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Punjab Grille Capitol album, translated a selection of Gio Ponti’s illustrated letters,… Read More
A Taste for Architectural Drawings
01.04.2026
A Taste for Architectural Drawings01.04.2026
– Neil Bingham
The smelling and tasting of historical architectural drawings have been overlooked by scholars as valuable research tools, particularly in matters of dating and authorship. In this short discussion—a foretaste of a future volume, or two, that I intend to write on the subject—I demonstrate that drawings made by architects, including… Read More
theoretical & imaginary DMC