Category: drawing histories
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove
09.11.2023
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove09.11.2023
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
27.10.2023
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany27.10.2023
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
20.10.2023
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once20.10.2023
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
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
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective
02.10.2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective02.10.2023
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
31.07.2023
Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil31.07.2023
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
21.07.2023
Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture21.07.2023
‘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
06.07.2023
A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine06.07.2023
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
Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse
05.07.2023
Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse05.07.2023
The following text is reproduced from The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), edited by Caroline Voet, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas. The publication is available in print or as an ebook, here. You can find Joseph Bedford on Instagram here. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many architects… Read More
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape
29.06.2023
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape29.06.2023
– Stan Allen and Marina Correia
‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More
Casa Ugalde Sketch
19.06.2023
Casa Ugalde Sketch19.06.2023
– Laura Bonell and Daniel Lopez-Doriga
As José Antonio Coderch told it, Mr. Ugalde climbed on the hill, sat in the shadow of a carob tree and looked around him. He then hired Coderch and his partner Manuel Valls with the unique proposal of building a house in the outskirts of Barcelona that could preserve the… Read More
Drawing as Preservation
14.06.2023
Drawing as Preservation14.06.2023
Jiang Yuan’s ‘Epanggong Illustration’ is a reverie made real by the tip of Yuan’s paintbrush. It is simultaneously a fantasy of a past to which one cannot return, a fascination with a form of existence that has disappeared, and also a set of ideas, which live on in spheres far… Read More
‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church
30.05.2023
‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church30.05.2023
Peter Celsing won the competition to design the Härlanda Church, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1952, and the church was completed seven years later in 1959. The design of the project is a fragmented list of reflections by the architect in the account reproduced below—which was first drafted on receipts from the… Read More
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop
02.05.2023
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop02.05.2023
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh
This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings exploring the relationship between form, space and programme. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia
26.04.2023
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia26.04.2023
In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More
Abelardo Morell
06.04.2023
Abelardo Morell06.04.2023
In 2006 Abelardo Morell was invited by a collector with a Palazzo in Venice to photograph a camera obscura image of the Grand Canal in his mother’s bedroom. Morell returned to the city a year later. His host, pointing at a window in a Canaletto painting, said he knew a… Read More
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée
03.04.2023
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée03.04.2023
This text is excerpted from Aldo Rossi. Insulae, edited by Nadejda Bartels, a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, run by the Tchoban Foundation (on display from 4 February – 14 May 2023). Drawing represented for Aldo Rossi the privileged… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31.03.2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31.03.2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection
13.02.2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13.02.2023
Michael Sorkin, in Drawings for Sale, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator: ‘the drawing as artefact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture’. Sorkin argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator… Read More
Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden
20.01.2023
Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden20.01.2023
Stone, hard and unfeeling, appears in our contemporary lexicon as a metaphor for the lifeless and the immutable. Yet in the classical gardens and paintings of China, stones were objects of fascination for the élite literati for precisely the opposite reason: the cosmic forces of creation and dissolution they, and… Read More
Quinta da Malagueira
11.08.2023
Quinta da Malagueira11.08.2023
– 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