Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
5 March 2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)5 March 2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Seeing, and Disbelieving
2 March 2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving2 March 2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan
1 March 2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan1 March 2020
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’
28 February 2020
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’28 February 2020
– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier
19 February 2020
Buckminster Fuller: Geodesic Chandelier19 February 2020
The Iconography of Desolation
17 February 2020
The Iconography of Desolation17 February 2020
‘We now discover an iconoscope that shall forgive the divorce of heaven and hell while it flashes before us for our selective graces – the bits and pieces of Divine Catastrophe. Such a scope has lost all division and order. One must pick over the scattered icons the way a… Read More
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library
7 February 2020
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library7 February 2020
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer
6 February 2020
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer6 February 2020
– Tony Fretton and Sarah Handelman
Sometimes you make drawings to tell yourself the project is going okay. Well, that’s what I do. This drawing came quite late in the design of the first Lisson Gallery. In the way I used to work, you would reach a point where you’d have a very thorough sense of… Read More
La Casa Della Falsita
5 February 2020
La Casa Della Falsita5 February 2020
The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More
Behind the Lines 14
3 February 2020
Behind the Lines 143 February 2020
These are just insignificant sketches, but they remind me of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in 1937; by night it was a unique experience – mémorable. You see, one theme of the exposition was light and water: an expression of what could be achieved with the power of modern electricity,… Read More
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament
29 January 2020
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament29 January 2020
Sketch made by Sir Basil Spence at a meeting of the Royal Fine Art Commission in January 1969 to illustrate a scheme for enlarging the accommodation of MPs in the Houses of Parliament made by his assistant Christopher Libby.
Battersea Redevelopment
22 January 2020
Battersea Redevelopment22 January 2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
Origins in Translation
20 January 2020
Origins in Translation20 January 2020
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
One Small Sketch for Mankind
13 January 2020
One Small Sketch for Mankind13 January 2020
Raymond Loewy’s contribution to NASA was not rocket science. It was one small sketch for mankind. But, like everything the designer ever did, the real significance of these fascinating sketches was outrageously bigged-up by their author. In his blindingly flashy oeuvre, their status is comparable to his (infamous) work for Coca-Cola.… Read More
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
8 January 2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino8 January 2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer
2 January 2020
Marie-José Van Hee: Drawn Closer2 January 2020
Towards the end of my architectural studies in the late 1960s I moved into a little house near the Prinsenhof neighbourhood of Ghent. My neighbours were Ghent people, and my landlord owned the whole block. Every month he would collect rent, and although he didn’t talk to most people, he… Read More
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture
26 December 2019
Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture26 December 2019
One of the best-known drawings related to the discipline is the ‘allegory of architecture’, drawn by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen and engraved by Jean-Jacques Aliamet. [1] The original is now in the collection of Drawing Matter. Aliamet’s engraving serves as the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, and was included… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24 December 2019
A Dose of Dosio24 December 2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
Surface-oriented
18 December 2019
Surface-oriented18 December 2019
My desk is a bit like an island: it could just as well be in some other country as here. —Italo Calvino The here in question is a narrow room occupying the top floor of a three-storey house on the southern fringe of Montparnasse. Heavily laden bookshelves and strategically placed objets extend along the… Read More
From a little below and to the right
17 December 2019
From a little below and to the right17 December 2019
There is a characteristic recurrence in Lutyens’ drawings of a quickly sketched oblique perspective in his own hand. Apparently, this is added as an afterthought once the orthogonal image of the building itself has been fully developed elsewhere (sometimes by assistants), and both usually appear on the same sheet. Invariably,… Read More
Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach
13 December 2019
Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach13 December 2019
Two square black-and-white ink and gouache drawings from 1973 by Estonian architect and artist Leonhard Lapin show scenes from a deserted Baltic beach. On a calm white seashore, below the somewhat sinister black sky and the straight line of the horizon, stand solitary objects: two large flat L-shaped figures on… Read More
Summerson: The Little House
4 March 2020
Summerson: The Little House4 March 2020
– John Summerson
– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.
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