Category: drawing histories
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.
29 February 2024
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.29 February 2024
– Felicia Liang and William Wikström
Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping
26 February 2024
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping26 February 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 February 2024
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World21 February 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
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens
15 February 2024
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens15 February 2024
In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design
7 February 2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design7 February 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
Simon Fraser University
1 February 2024
Simon Fraser University1 February 2024
This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More
Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with Streamers Everywhere
25 January 2024
Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with Streamers Everywhere25 January 2024
– Juan Mercadé Brulles, Jesús Esquinas-Dessy and Isabel Zaragoza
During the process of cataloguing drawings from the special collection of Josep Maria Jujol (1879-1949), housed in the graphic archive of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB UPC), our attention was drawn to a particular drawing, illustrating a festive urban sequence.[1] At first glance, it is a captivating object, simultaneously… Read More
Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation
17 January 2024
Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation 17 January 2024
– Jarne Geenens and Elizabeth Merrill
Francesco di Giorgio’s autograph manuscript of machine design, the Opusculum de architectura is among the most enigmatic records of early modern architecture.[1] Dedicated to Duke Federico da Montefeltro, the compact vellum manuscript celebrates the art and ingenuity of technical design, while simultaneously capturing the energy and ambition of the fabled… Read More
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction
10 January 2024
Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction10 January 2024
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
Alberto Ponis, The London Years
14 December 2023
Alberto Ponis, The London Years14 December 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
The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review
8 December 2023
The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review8 December 2023
The Polyhedrists is described as ‘a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern period’.[1] Despite it being a relatively short book, it offers a complex and confronting view of polyhedra’s history; polyhedra being three-dimensional convex shapes with flat polygonal faces and straight edges. Its author, Noam… Read More
DMJ – The Stereoautograph
6 December 2023
DMJ – The Stereoautograph6 December 2023
The Zeiss Stereoautograph 1914 Bild II is a mammoth device (Fig.1). It weighs over 400kg and has the same footprint as a Smart Car. When it was retired and donated to the Zeiss Archive in 2004, the Technical University of Hanover had to remove part of its roof in order to lift… Read More
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines
14 November 2023
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines14 November 2023
I first encountered Heinz Isler’s thin reinforced concrete shells when I saw his presentation ‘Third Decade of Structural Shells’ at the thirtieth anniversary symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), in Madrid, in September 1989. This was the first time I saw his inspirational drawing ‘Natural Hills on… Read More
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers
9 November 2023
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers9 November 2023
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove
9 November 2023
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove9 November 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. Joseph… Read More
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany
27 October 2023
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany27 October 2023
In 1957, Alvar Aalto gave a speech in Munich entitled ‘Schöner Wohnen’.[1] He referred to his own design, the Hansaviertel apartment block in Berlin—his first project in Germany—as he described the key concerns in the design of the modern dwelling. (The construction of Aalto’s second German project, the Neue Vahr… Read More
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once
20 October 2023
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once20 October 2023
In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album
6 October 2023
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album6 October 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
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective
2 October 2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective2 October 2023
This essay discusses three enigmatic one-point perspective drawings. The first was made by the precocious Prussian architect and teacher Friedrich Gilly, the second by Alberto Sartoris as a young student of architecture in Geneva, and the third by the relatively unknown modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. These drawings have been… Read More
Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil
31 July 2023
Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil31 July 2023
The renderings for Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt Memorial to the Soil (1936) show the project’s incorporation of earth berms as a major component of its design. In a sense, the earth itself became architecture. About his design, as inscribed on the pencil drawing above, Wright wrote that the project was… Read More
Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture
21 July 2023
Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture21 July 2023
‘Found’ in the archive at Drawing Matter, this wild text by Marinetti on his friend and collaborator Sant’Elia seems not to have been previously translated. Its occasion was a commemorative exhibition of the young architect’s work organized in 1930 by the commune of his native city, Como, fourteen years after… Read More
A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine
6 July 2023
A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine6 July 2023
Most of us must sometimes receive a message or a drawing that in retrospect we wish we’d retained—but they go astray. In my own case I can recall three: a note from the philosopher Bernard Williams about his friend Thomas Nagel (lost without record) a postcard from Göran Schildt clarifying our… Read More
Quinta da Malagueira
11 August 2023
Quinta da Malagueira11 August 2023
– Pier Vittorio Aureli
In this short text Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on Quinta da Malagueira housing project in what he sees as a potential convergence between formal principals and political intentions. Quinta da Malagueira is perhaps the last great ‘social housing project’. That is, it is the last great architectural contribution to the… Read More
sketch plan DMC