Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting

Bruce Goff

Bruce Goff

Nicholas Olsberg

This is an unbuilt house and studio project for two artists in the dry country of west Texas. It comes from a happy moment when architects could see no equation between the unreasonable and the unbuildable. Bruce Goff christened it APARTURE, perhaps a play on the words ‘apartness’, for its… Read More

Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge

Michael Graves: Fargo-Moorehead Cultural Bridge

Jordan Kauffman

The Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Bridge is an unrealised project combining infrastructural and cultural programs: a vehicular bridge between two cities over the Red River, a performing arts building in Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River Valley heritage interpretive centre in Moorhead, Minnesota, and at the centre over the river itself, an… Read More

The Continuous Monument, Shatwell

The Continuous Monument, Shatwell

To provoke an archaeology of collage making Niall Hobhouse asked Adolfo Natalini and Gian Piero Frassinelli to prepare a last collage, some 50 years after the first Continuous Monument, to imagine that it had finally arrived at Shatwell.

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Helen Thomas

Frail and delicate, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s drawing of a geodesic sphere floats, without context, in the space of the paper it inhabits. More than the form it reveals, the net of thin, red lines expresses the presence of the space within it. A perspective effect emanates from the central point… Read More

Siza and the limits of representation

Siza and the limits of representation

Niall Hobhouse

Over the years in which the collection of Drawing Matter has been formed we have come to understand that the most productive discussion of architecture is actually about the precise relationship between the drawing and ‘its’ building. One good rule is that an architect with a powerful idea is always… Read More

Sans Humour?

Sans Humour?

Niall Hobhouse

It seems that architects are too self-conscious – or perhaps in need of being seen as permanently on duty – to portray themselves or what they do with much humour, let alone self-critical caricature. Edwin Lutyens is an honourable exception, even if his self-mockery ultimately becomes a public performance – a… Read More

Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics

Aux Citoyens Membres de La Commune attachés à la commissions des services publics

Matt Page

i Hector Horeau’s sketch of the Church of La Madeleine came at the height of the Paris Commune – the radical socialist regime that governed the French capital from 18 March – 28 May 1871. Although dated 19 April 1871, the drawing is on the verso of a frontispiece to Panorama… Read More

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Niall Hobhouse

Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More

Conjunction and Incongruity

Conjunction and Incongruity

Polly Gould

The word archive, meaning both the collection of documents and the building that houses them, is doubled in its meaning and it is not necessarily clear which one precedes the other. Drawing Matter Open Day highlighted in interesting ways the relation of causality between building and drawing as document or… Read More

Netherfield Scroll Two

Netherfield Scroll Two

Michael Gold

What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More

Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll

Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll

On 7 April 2018, former members of the Grunt Group – Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones – presented their Netherfield Scroll to Drawing Matter. The 20-foot-long drawing was created c. 1971 for a low-density, social housing estate in Milton Keynes. The following video is a brief… Read More

Netherfield Scroll One

Netherfield Scroll One

Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones

The following two-part conversation surrounds the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll – a 20-foot-long drawing created c. 1971 by Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones, otherwise known as the ‘Grunt Group’, for the commission of a low-density housing estate in Milton Keynes. The conversation with Jeremy Dixon… Read More

Behind the Lines 6

Behind the Lines 6

Philippa Lewis

Richard Bentley cracked open the red seal, smiling as he always did at the peculiar crest of a man in a ridiculous long-tasselled hat, and folded out the letter. His mood was anxious; he scratched his head nervously with one hand and knocked over the ink on his drawing table with… Read More

Richard J. Neutra

Richard J. Neutra

Nicholas Olsberg

‘Richard J. Neutra has carried on the Wagner tradition of experimentation in new forms, materials and methods of construction… an impetus to the intelligent solution of new problems.’  Ernestine M. Fantl on the Corona Avenue School, ‘Modern Architecture in California’ (Typescript Mimeograph, MoMA Archives, 1935) Just before 6 o’clock on… Read More

Yacht Club Path

Yacht Club Path

Alberto Ponis

I The drawings have different stories. They don’t have a linear story, a beginning date and then a finished date at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in the beginning before the project is built and then continue during the construction of the project and sometimes too – actually, quite often… Read More

Foster + Partners: CLEVELAND CLINIC HEALTH EDUCATION CAMPUS

Foster + Partners: CLEVELAND CLINIC HEALTH EDUCATION CAMPUS

Norman Foster

Following on from Farshid Moussavi’s curatorial decision to create a display of construction drawings that showcase the ‘full complexity of the different systems and parts of buildings’, I chose this compelling BIM drawing from the Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus project, which suitably illustrates our integrated design approach. Throughout the… Read More

arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse

arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse

arq & Drawing Matter To launch the collaboration with Drawing Matter, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, the first issue of Volume 22 opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in an intense one-day session.… Read More

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

A Fragment of Wright’s Great City

Nicholas Olsberg

Wright, Wagner and the Idea of the Great City We become greater in service to the general effect, more harmonious as part of the whole.– Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘To my European Co-Workers’, 1925 ‘I came upon the Secession during the winter of 1910,’ Wright wrote in An Autobiography, noting with great… Read More

Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan

Architectural Research Quarterly: Plan

Volume 22, Issue 1 pp. 8–40 This issue of arq introduces the new collaboration with Drawing Matter. To launch the collaboration, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, this issue opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in… Read More

Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’

Schinkel: ‘Precisely Loose’

Lok-Kan Chau

What light may Schinkel’s drawings shed on Building Information Modelling (BIM) practice? In 1806 the young Schinkel was asked to develop a residence design from a set of initial layout plans. He drew a façade section, a peristyle detail and a column capital, before the war began and the commission… Read More

without irony 1

without irony 1

Niall Hobhouse

without irony 3

without irony 3

Niall Hobhouse

without irony 2

without irony 2

Niall Hobhouse

Alexander Brodsky: The Shed

Alexander Brodsky: The Shed