Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture
07.11.2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture07.11.2019
I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
01.11.2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek01.11.2019
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
What Lies Beneath
31.10.2019
What Lies Beneath31.10.2019
‘The people of Sydney ought to be afraid of the sharks, but for some reason they do not seem to be,’ recalled Mark Twain in his 1897 Following the Equator. The travelogue was the result of an 1895 lecture tour that Twain, by then 60, had made of the British Empire… Read More
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s
25.10.2019
The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s25.10.2019
Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More
Tales from the Crypt
18.10.2019
Tales from the Crypt18.10.2019
The great mysteries are not the invisible things, but the visible ones. And to me, it is a great and fascinating mystery that the same architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, designed one of the world’s most awe-inspiring large buildings and one of its most exquisite small ones: Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral and… Read More
Behind the Lines 13
10.10.2019
Behind the Lines 1310.10.2019
I selected a distant meadow in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself…. No sooner was the house completed than I knew it was not far enough away from everything I wished to leave behind…Later I sold the house and grounds for… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10.10.2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10.10.2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea
07.10.2019
Gio Ponti: un disegno è un idea07.10.2019
Signora Onvoloni, here is a drawing that might find a place in your cabinet of ideas: ‘a drawing is an idea’ – Gio Ponti, translated by Guido Beltramini [1] All seems simple enough on the face of it, and of course one smiles, just as Gio hoped we might. But… Read More
Behind the Lines 12
23.09.2019
Behind the Lines 1223.09.2019
1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero
23.09.2019
John Hejduk’s Axonometric Degree Zero23.09.2019
Sometime in 1981, while I was working on my final thesis project at the Cooper Union, John Hejduk set me a drawing exercise. We had been discussing the spatial implications of the 90-degree axonometric. [1] Hejduk had a very particular understanding of this drawing type, which involved folding or hinging… Read More
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’
23.08.2019
Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’23.08.2019
The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More
Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan
10.08.2019
Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan10.08.2019
“Form follows fender” In James Gowan’s parallel projections we were particularly interested in their spatial qualities, and how the form could develop. Seen as a negative space, it could be a staggered courtyard. James Gowan used a car shape as a reference. By extracting the theme and duplicating the shape… Read More
Alternative Histories: Sam Jacob Studio on Archizoom
31.07.2019
Alternative Histories: Sam Jacob Studio on Archizoom31.07.2019
What might the purpose of an alternative history be? How might we collaborate with the past? What passes from one generation to another or from one hand to another? Is the construction of a (new) model of an (old) project a way of producing an alternative past? Or different present?… Read More
Alternative Histories: Veldwerk Architecten on Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont
31.07.2019
Alternative Histories: Veldwerk Architecten on Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont31.07.2019
Paper Mountain Like the models it displays, the paper mountain exhibition scenography finds its origins in a historic drawing from the Drawing Matter archive. Gabriel Dumont’s section of a theatre auditorium and balcony seating, drawn c.1770, proposes a structure that holds the audience as if they were godly statues of a stacked temple, suspended… Read More
Alternative Histories: Nikolaus Bienefeld on James Gowan
30.07.2019
Alternative Histories: Nikolaus Bienefeld on James Gowan30.07.2019
Die ersten Modelle einer Entwurfsskizze verkörpern den architektonischen Gedanken.So, wie die Skizze durch die Art des Striches, der Farbigkeit, der Detaillierung eine oder viele Interpretationen ermöglicht, so eröffnet die Wahl und der Umgang mit dem Material des Modells eine größtmögliche Offenheit im architektonischen Prozess. The first models of a design sketch… Read More
Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza
30.07.2019
Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza30.07.2019
When we look at Siza’s drawing we try to forget the project we know. We see the beautiful irregularity of a pencil perimeter, defined by obstacles of all sorts. Within it, the architect added straight lines, an attempt to bring order and create a place to dwell, to find shelter.… Read More
Alternative Histories: Noreile Breen on Louis Kahn
30.07.2019
Alternative Histories: Noreile Breen on Louis Kahn30.07.2019
Kahn’s drawing is composed of solid and dotted hard pencil lines with red hatching on coloured paper; conventions representing elements above, below and through a cut line. Parallel lines and breaks between lines give an indication of scale. Curious, massive, triangular, hollow and inaccessible forms meet broken lines in a… Read More
Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk
29.07.2019
Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk29.07.2019
John Hejduk’s drawing sketches a house for a couple, or two coupled houses, composed of two almost identical small buildings connected to each other by a walkway which holds each house at a distance apart. Each house has its own spiral stair for independent movement and what looks like its… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
07.11.2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson07.11.2019
– Francesco Milizia
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
sketch elevation competition survey publication DMC