Category: drawing histories

Eisenman on Rossi

Eisenman on Rossi

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

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Erin McKellar

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 

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

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

Lisson 1 + 2

Tony Fretton

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

Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

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

Anton Markus Pasing

Peter Wilson

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 

Paul Rudolph: Transcending the Conventions of Architectural Drawing 

Timothy M. Rohan

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

DMJ – Something in the Air: On the Atmosphere of a Lee Miller Photograph

Mark Dorrian

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

Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman

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

Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette

Ana Bonet Miró

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

On Origins and Originality

Niall Hobhouse

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

OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative

Richard Hall

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

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Structures and Sequences of Spaces

Marco Vanucci

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

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Erin McKellar

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

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Nicholas Olsberg

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

OMA: Collaborators—Allies

OMA: Collaborators—Allies

Richard Hall

This is the fifth post, in a series of six, 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: Abstract Forms of Baroque Sculpture

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Abstract Forms of Baroque Sculpture

Marco Vanucci

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 opening article ‘Eclecticism and Unity of Language’ that was published in the first issue of Spazio. This second post presents… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Nicholas Olsberg

William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024.  Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More

Notes on Nabokov

Notes on Nabokov

Michael Becker

Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Editors and Chloé Parent

Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… Read More

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki

It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Erin Besler, Marshall Brown, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith

The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More

A Missing Drawing

A Missing Drawing

John Evelyn

Being casualy in the Privy Gallery at White-hall, his Majestie [Charles II] gave me thanks (before divers Lords & noble men) for my Book of Architecture & Sylva againe: That they were the best designed & usefull for the matter & subject, the best printed & designd (meaning the Tallè doucès [engravings] of the Paralelles) that… Read More

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Cara Rachele

The following text was first presented at the 2021 edition of the Lucerne Talks, the biennial Symposium on Pedagogy in Architecture at HSLU’s School of Engineering and Architecture in Lucerne; Drawing Matter’s Niall Hobhouse and Matt Page also took part, with their text Quantum Collecting. It was later published as… Read More