Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting

A Bath for Immortality

A Bath for Immortality

Clara Maria Puglisi

It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

Alison Bartlett

The ladder, a seemingly unexceptional instrument within the array of futuristic and utopian architectural schemes, sits front and centre; the protagonist of not only this drawing but of Constant’s almost two-decade-long project, spanning 1956–1974, entitled ‘New Babylon’. Propped somewhat haphazardly against a series of horizontally-connected and vertically-angled planes, it exudes… Read More

Protected: Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra

Protected: Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra

Asun González Pérez

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More

DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata

DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Enzo Mari’s Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata (Dynamic Formation of a Reticulated Sphere), one of a series of objects produced under the title Relatione tra Contenuto e Contenitore (Relation between Content and Container), was manufactured by the Milanese company Danese between 1959 and 1963. It is a transparent polyester… Read More

Protected: Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine

Protected: Object of Desire — Haff Cross-Hatch Machine

Jeremy Peacock

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.M. Howell

In view here is a startling watercolour by Charles Stanley Peach, titled Plan of a Church Constructed on Divine Principles (1910)—his pictorial articulation of the cruciform layout of the Christian Cathedral. Architectural aspects are overlayed upon two images of Jesus. The first with his arms splayed wide, hands pinned to… Read More

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940), trained first at the Royal Institute of Technology (where he would teach from 1931), and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, undertook an extensive study tour of Greece and Italy, and opened his own practice around 1913, working entirely in Sweden, and… Read More

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nanase Shirokawa

‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More

Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping

Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping

Tom Cookson

This text is an excerpt from Shallow Time: The Burren (Dpr-Barcelona and Irish Architecture Foundation, 2023), 73-74, written by Tom Cookson. The text is reproduced with permission from the Irish Architecture Foundation. How to communicate the topographic nature of landscape and lived experience on a map reproduced on paper? The composition… Read More

Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World

Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Caterina Pincioni, secretary at… Read More