Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim
17.04.2024
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim17.04.2024
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
10.04.2024
DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata10.04.2024
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
C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral
05.04.2024
C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral05.04.2024
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
02.04.2024
Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter02.04.2024
– 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
04.03.2024
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things04.03.2024
‘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
26.02.2024
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping26.02.2024
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
21.02.2024
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World21.02.2024
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
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design
07.02.2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design07.02.2024
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. Between 1971 and 1973,… Read More
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo
05.02.2024
In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo05.02.2024
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. During the peaceful and beautiful train ride that goes from London Paddington to Castle Cary, I dedicated time to thinking about what… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31.01.2024
Careful Crudeness31.01.2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29.01.2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29.01.2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’
15.12.2023
Schmitz and Drévet: The Egyptian Pavilions at the 1867 ‘Exposition Universelle’15.12.2023
The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was one of the most frivolous and lavish events in late-19th-century European history. Erected along the Champs-de-Mars, it encompassed a huge, covered arena surrounded by dozens of pavilions and gardens.[1] It was conceived by Napoleon III to showcase of industrial and technological progress, to promote… Read More
Alberto Ponis, The London Years
14.12.2023
Alberto Ponis, The London Years14.12.2023
I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More
On Drawing
30.11.2023
On Drawing30.11.2023
A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More
Guy Debord—An Art of War
29.11.2023
Guy Debord—An Art of War29.11.2023
– Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy
The following is an extract from the book Emmanuel Guy, Laurence Le Bras, and Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Guy Debord: Un Art de La Guerre (Editions Gallimard, 2013), pp. 92–96 published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Guy Debord: an art of war’, presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand… Read More
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial
20.11.2023
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial20.11.2023
In 2001, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) acquired at auction an item described in the catalogue as ‘Architectural Drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park’. The unsigned, undated drawing is a perspective view of an obelisk, the base of which is a four-faced distyle Doric temple. This… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m Going to Get Medieval on Your Ass!
16.11.2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m Going to Get Medieval on Your Ass!16.11.2023
‘I’m going to get medieval on your ass!’ Any analogy between the hefty massing of the middle-ages and soi-disant Brutalism is here revived in the bold metal hinges of our garage door, worthy of some château fort. Likewise the solid lead parapet of the roof could well guard a fortress, if also reminiscent of the… Read More
Quantum Collecting: A Few Principles and Mechanisms for the Acquisition of Architectural Drawings
06.11.2023
Quantum Collecting: A Few Principles and Mechanisms for the Acquisition of Architectural Drawings06.11.2023
– Niall Hobhouse and Matt Page
Drawing Matter is often asked to contribute to discussions, initiated by public institutions with significant collections of architectural drawings, about what—and what not—to collect. For ourselves, this feels the wrong way round, not least because we have no public mandate and have always resisted formulating (still less, publishing) any sort… Read More
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing
13.10.2023
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing13.10.2023
The following notes reflect on a first year teaching studio led by Bahar Avanoğlu at Istanbul Bilgi University. The studio took Niall McLaughlin’s Alternative Histories model, an interpretation of a sketch by Basil Spence for extending the Houses of Parliament in London, as a starting point to continue a chain… Read More
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album
06.10.2023
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album06.10.2023
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More
François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’
05.10.2023
François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’05.10.2023
François Cointeraux was born in Lyon in 1740 and was introduced to agriculture and construction at an early age through his family’s business ventures. When his uncle designated him the ‘universal heir’ of his company, Cointeraux inherited several buildings in Lyon and around 24 houses in the area. His marriage… Read More
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman
28.09.2023
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman28.09.2023
Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More
Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture
22.09.2023
Hans Hollein & Spiritual Expression in Architecture22.09.2023
The defining characteristics of modern architecture took shape against a host of disorientating shifts in the 19th century. On the theoretical side, the instantiation and development of aesthetics as an autonomous realm strained a sacred harmony between beauty, truth, and goodness. On the practical side, technological, social, and cultural advancements… Read More
Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity
22.04.2024
Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity22.04.2024
– 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
Observed sketch theoretical & imaginary DMC Open Call: Storytellers, Observed