Category: Drawing Matter archive: research & collecting
Disney: The Architecture of Staged Realities
10.09.2021
Disney: The Architecture of Staged Realities10.09.2021
‘Project Life Cycle’ provides a brief look into the complex work behind the scenes of a Walt Disney Company production. It is a meticulous formalisation that maps the industrial-organisational apparatus of the life cycle of a Disney project. The creative process is abstracted into a sequence of decisions, a neatly… Read More
John Nash: Designs for Langham House, ca. 1812–1816
06.09.2021
John Nash: Designs for Langham House, ca. 1812–181606.09.2021
Extracted from Stories from Architecture: Behind the Lines at Drawing Matter by Philippa Lewis, published by MIT Press © 2021. Preorder the book here. The drawings around which Stories from Architecture are written are all part of the Drawing Matter collection. Some of the texts were first published as ‘Behind the Lines’. Nash… Read More
Cosmos Street Revisited
31.08.2021
Cosmos Street Revisited31.08.2021
This response relates to a text by Oscar Binder and Nicholas Podlanha published by Drawing Matter in July 2021, which described and reconstructed (badly) a lost project by the deceased architect James Clark. In fact I am James Clark (decidedly not dead) and the project parodied in this less than… Read More
Superstudio: Finding the Horizon
12.08.2021
Superstudio: Finding the Horizon12.08.2021
Until not too long ago, I would be asked to explain to youngsters accustomed to digital graphics how I used to make montages. I felt like an archaeologist, explaining how, in the Palaeolithic era, Neanderthals used to make their tools. Across several workshops, I have realised that the techniques today… Read More
Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa
12.08.2021
Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa12.08.2021
This is the first in a series revisiting responses from architects to the question: Where to Begin?. The question was posed by the Drawing Matter editors while compiling the first volume in our Extracts series – find more information here. Beginning to sketch a project has always been easier for me… Read More
Building the Gowan Shed
30.07.2021
Building the Gowan Shed30.07.2021
Through the week of July 12–17, thirteen young architects camped at Shatwell Farm in order to realise a shed from an enigmatic early drawing by James Gowan. The workshop was initiated and led by Maria-Chiara Piccinelli of PiM.studio and Corinna Dean of ARCA. This film portrays the (re)design and construction… Read More
Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House
28.07.2021
Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House28.07.2021
The editors were thrilled to receive this response from Neil Jackson to our publication of drawings and literature relating to Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight house. We are always interested in receiving comments and feedback from our readers: editors@drawingmatter.org. In taking the plan of the Stirling & Gowan’s Isle… Read More
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive
26.07.2021
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive26.07.2021
Whoever decides to study the conditions of a practice of imagining architecture through/as line will, I am afraid, be left in despair. Once the theatrical mask of line’s incontrovertible instrumentality is seen to slip, line’s solidity, its all too evident honesty as a simple mimetic tool, turns up by and… Read More
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House
25.07.2021
Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House25.07.2021
I find myself lost in the woods, then reorientated, guided by the centralised chimney. Standing dead centre in front of the gate lodge, my gaze is lifted to the space between chimney and sky, between foreground or background. A cloud of white smoke disguises itself as an English cloud, passing… Read More
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House
21.07.2021
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House21.07.2021
– James Gowan, J. M. Richards, Laurent Stalder, James Stirling and Ellis Woodman
This first impetus for this article was provided by Laurent Stalder’s discussion of the sectional perspective drawing for the Isle of Wight house, reproduced here, which led us to J. M. Richards’ seminal essay, and then onward through the literature. In addition, we asked the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Canadian… Read More
On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts
13.07.2021
On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts13.07.2021
Along with his Do Hit Chair (2000), a pristine stainless steel box measuring 1000 x 700 x 750 mm, Dutch-born designer Marijn van der Poll supplies a sledgehammer. In an act of brute physical force he requires the user to expressively sculpt his own seating morphology, not only allowing but… Read More
Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction
08.07.2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction08.07.2021
Follow James Gowan, through his own photographs, as he inspects the construction progress of the Leicester Engineering Building. While these photographs may have been taken for immediate use at the time, they now serve as a permanent record of the temporary and internal structures that were later disassembled or concealed.… Read More
The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion
15.06.2021
The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion15.06.2021
Peter Märkli’s hand-drawn section of the ancient monument Hagia Sophia (532–7) is part of a working process developed alongside his design work. The output is a collection of investigative drawings that document sacred archetypal buildings, and articulate his resolved thesis that ‘architecture has a language’. The drawing illustrates a system… Read More
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh
15.06.2021
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh15.06.2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work
09.06.2021
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work09.06.2021
All drawings contain traces of all previously drawn mediations. [1] All drawings are silent acts of memorialising (by employing inter-subjective readings of iconography, lineage, parody, reverie and reflexivity) what has been drawn before, or thought to have been so, or simply, what has been, consciously misplaced. [2] The text above… Read More
The Future City
09.06.2021
The Future City09.06.2021
Antonio Sant’Elia foresees the technological cities of the mid to late 20th century. High-rise towers shooting skyward, train lines and highways articulated as horizontally streaking into vanishing points, and aeroplanes arriving and departing omnidirectionally. Similarly, Winold Reiss’s Future City: Study for a Mural, is an homage to technological advancement, and… Read More
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh
07.06.2021
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh07.06.2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More
Cartographies of the Imagination
04.06.2021
Cartographies of the Imagination04.06.2021
– Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah
Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More
Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church
01.06.2021
Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church01.06.2021
Up until the turn of the twentieth century architectural renderings tended to be created for clients early in the design process to give them an idea of how a proposed building would look. At that point however they began to be used more widely for publicity purposes as well, thanks… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre
01.06.2021
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre01.06.2021
‘Artists such as Poelzig, prevented from building in real life, have been driven to create Expressionist cinema architecture […] But in the long run, pasteboard fantasy creations […] can never be satisfying fodder for the architect; he has an inner urge to conceive and erect buildings in which real people… Read More
Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis
27.05.2021
Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis27.05.2021
This study of Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis was made by Pascal Coste (b. 1787 Marseille, France) in 1840 as part of an archeological survey of the Persian City of Persepolis. Through a combination of plan and perspective, Coste portrayed the symmetrical arrangement and elaborate construction of the ancient… Read More
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy
19.05.2021
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy19.05.2021
The following texts are excerpted from Gordon Shrigley, Insignificance: A short discourse on the physical and ideational economy of line within architectural representation (Solitude Editions, 1998). Now, twenty years after Insignificance was first published, Gordon Shrigley has revisited the publication for a series of postings on Drawing Matter. Each of these posts connect… Read More
Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva
19.05.2021
Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva19.05.2021
For the curious visitor that approaches the historic remains of the Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome, it will take a lot of effort to contextualize the building as it could have once been. That which before had allowed for a gentle processional approach to the ruin has now been… Read More
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)
16.09.2021
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)16.09.2021
– Gustav Metzger
The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More
DMC exhibition design theoretical & imaginary housing urban form