Category: drawing histories
Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook
17.04.2025
Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook17.04.2025
Zaha Hadid’s sketchbook for the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence (1979-1980), held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation with corresponding works at Drawing Matter, has proved invaluable for understanding her early career development of ideas. The project marked Hadid’s first professional solo endeavour, and she established her own office around the same… Read More
The (Im)possible Palimpsest
10.04.2025
The (Im)possible Palimpsest10.04.2025
Preceding the Campo Marzio plan, a plate named Scenographia Campi Martii offers a clue towards an understanding of Piranesi’s work—the terminology is fundamental, the word Scenographia is purposely chosen to make a direct link to the theatrical representation and scenic design, often investigated by Piranesi. The image presented in this… Read More
Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz
07.04.2025
Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 07.04.2025
Last year, Francis Martinuzzi contacted Drawing Matter after seeing a reproduction of one of his drawings on our website. The drawing was from a project from the submission for his architectural diploma with Jean Faloux under the tutelage of Antoine Grumbach at Unité Pédagogiuqe no. 6 (L’École nationale supérieure d’architecture… Read More
Curtains
28.03.2025
Curtains28.03.2025
– Petra Blaisse and Sophie Wehtje
Brief email exchanges. When meeting physically is out of the question, good old-fashioned correspondence still works, even if and for some time now, it is done electronically. This is how many of the editorial pieces on the Drawing Matter website come into being—through a chain of typed messages. It’s a… Read More
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter
20.03.2025
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter20.03.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More
Broadcasting Norwegian Time
13.03.2025
Broadcasting Norwegian Time13.03.2025
All drawings were done by Nils Holter Office during the NRK project period 1941-47, each made in pencil on paper with the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Drawings from Nils Holter’s archives/Jan Bauck Arkitektkontor. Photographs courtesy of Jørgen Johan Tandberg. In the summer of 2024, and after several… Read More
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation
06.03.2025
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation06.03.2025
The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’.… Read More
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text
18.02.2025
Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text18.02.2025
Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More
Drawing on Ideas
17.02.2025
Drawing on Ideas17.02.2025
In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank
11.02.2025
Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank11.02.2025
Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto
10.02.2025
Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 10.02.2025
– Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman
This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More
Lisson 1 + 2
07.02.2025
Lisson 1 + 207.02.2025
LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter
03.02.2025
Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter03.02.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More
Anton Markus Pasing
30.01.2025
Anton Markus Pasing30.01.2025
Münster, March 2024 Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. Nearly fifty years ago Nigel Coates writing in my Villa Auto AA exhibition catalogue chose the above quote from Roland Barthes to describe my pathological production of architectural fictions. These were hand-drawn, a… Read More
Paul Rudolph: Transcending the Conventions of Architectural Drawing
27.01.2025
Paul Rudolph: Transcending the Conventions of Architectural Drawing 27.01.2025
Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) is known for his compelling large-scale presentation drawings, such as the memorable perspective sections of his Yale Art & Architecture Building in New Haven, CT (1958-1963), among others. But a deeper dig into the Rudolph archive at the United States Library of Congress in Washington D.C. reveals… Read More
DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph
16.01.2025
DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph16.01.2025
Frontispieces are to do with storytelling and we find a curious example of this at the start of Humphrey Jennings’ posthumously published book Pandaemonium 1660–1886: the Coming of the Machine Age as Seen by Contemporary Observers. It is a photograph by Lee Miller of Jennings himself, a filmmaker, writer and… Read More
Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop
19.12.2024
Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop19.12.2024
The following text is a brief reflection on two lectures delivered at Shatwell Farm in August 2024 as part of the ENAC EPFL Drawing Research Platform. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read an account of the week, click here. The two lectures at… Read More
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette
18.11.2024
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette18.11.2024
The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More
On Origins and Originality
15.11.2024
On Origins and Originality15.11.2024
The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More
OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative
31.10.2024
OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative31.10.2024
This is the sixth and final post, in the series titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Structures and Sequences of Spaces
17.10.2024
Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Structures and Sequences of Spaces17.10.2024
Marco Vanucci and Drawing Matter revisit three seminal texts of Luigi Moretti, not generally available in translation. Christopher Huw Evans has translated the three texts for Drawing Matter. The first post presented Luigi Moretti’s article ‘Eclecticism and Unity of Language’ (published in the first issue of Spazio), and the second post featured Moretti’s… Read More
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood
14.10.2024
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood14.10.2024
At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3
10.10.2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 310.10.2024
This post concludes Nicholas Olsberg’s series on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, the text of which is included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Sounding corridors’: entry and sequence The driveway brings us into a… Read More
Eisenman on Rossi
12.02.2025
Eisenman on Rossi12.02.2025
– Peter Eisenman
Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping… Read More
Soane and Modernism