Category: drawing histories
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia
26 April 2023
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia26 April 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
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée
3 April 2023
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée3 April 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 March 2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31 March 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 February 2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13 February 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 January 2023
Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden20 January 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
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio
18 January 2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18 January 2023
This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 1970
17 January 2023
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 197017 January 2023
Watch Philippa Lewis’s recent lecture, ‘From Drawing to Text’, on how we tell stories from architecture, for The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology here. Geoff Freeman, sales director of a Northamptonshire shoe company, arrives at JFK Airport for his flight… Read More
DMJ – ‘All the varieties of Nature’s works under ground’: the Geological Imagination of Alexander Pope
9 December 2022
DMJ – ‘All the varieties of Nature’s works under ground’: the Geological Imagination of Alexander Pope9 December 2022
In 1739, the English poet Alexander Pope transformed his grotto – a subterranean passage that used to consist of a cryptoporticus with architectural orders – into ‘a mine’. Minerals were encrusted into the walls in a manner that imitated those found underground. Previous scholars have considered this to be a… Read More
DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge
15 November 2022
DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge15 November 2022
This text, published alongside Bernhard Siegert’s article ‘From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps’ marks the launch of the first and second issues of DMJournal–Architecture and Representation. Over the coming months, we will be publishing articles from both DMJ 1: The Geological Imagination and DMJ 2: Drawing Instruments/Instrumental Drawings. The… Read More
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism
19 October 2022
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism19 October 2022
As my title indicates, this text will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France… Read More
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints
12 October 2022
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints12 October 2022
One of the great enigmas of ukiyo-e – Japanese woodblock prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is the anachronistic intrusion of Western drawing into an apparently closed world; that the sophisticated culture of Edo (now modern Tokyo) seemingly closed off its borders since the Middle Ages. The widespread… Read More
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022
22 September 2022
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 202222 September 2022
Remote teaching as a pandemic consequence has already been a theme for Drawing Matter, in the January 2022 Melbourne University Venice Workshop it reached an almost surreal zenith. Remoteness is fundamental to Australia, whether the extreme separations of the outback or a pre-digital geographic estrangement from global cultural discourses. At… Read More
After the Revolution: Dugourc in Spain
16 September 2022
After the Revolution: Dugourc in Spain16 September 2022
After Jean Démosthène Dugourc’s forays into revolutionary paperwork, his return to silk and his migration to Spain to work for the Bourbons in 1800 places pressure on understanding his revolutionary activities, and whether he indeed had but briefly dabbled in the politics of the period before ultimately wishing, in his… Read More
Dugourc’s Playing Cards
14 September 2022
Dugourc’s Playing Cards14 September 2022
After the journée of 10 August, Jean Démosthène Dugourc sought to distance himself from Etienne Anisson-Dupéron. He turned his attention from wallpaper to playing cards, leasing a space with his Jacobin business partner Urbaine Jaume in the former warehouse of the Académie royale de musique, down the street from the… Read More
Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle
12 September 2022
Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle12 September 2022
This drawing is a print of a hand drawing I made eighteen years ago on a roll of tracing paper. The original drawing, made with rapidograph pens and a pencil, is now lost. Last month this blueprint was moved to Drawing Matter’s archive. Drawing Matter asked me to explain why… Read More
William Burges: Architectural drawing
25 August 2022
William Burges: Architectural drawing25 August 2022
– Editors
William Burges was elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860 and to its council in 1862. The text reproduced below is the transcript of the paper he delivered upon joining the RIBA. Reproduced from Transactions v.9-11(1858–1861), digitised by the University of Illinois, here.
Turning Point: The US Embassy in Dublin
17 August 2022
Turning Point: The US Embassy in Dublin17 August 2022
This is an extract of the construction drawings produced by John M. Johansen’s office in 1963 for the cylindrical US Embassy in Dublin. It is a three-dimensional ink drawing of the external precast concrete structure, describing two single-storey bays in isolation. Viewed abstractly it could almost be an anatomical study,… Read More
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House
10 June 2022
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House10 June 2022
A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century. Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it. A… Read More
Opportunism
2 June 2022
Opportunism2 June 2022
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
While declaring explicitly architectural intentions (especially in the beginning), the enthusiastic appropriation of technologies and techniques peripheral to architecture has been a constant theme in OMA’s work. In 1976, Elia Zenghelis commented on the role of the telephone in their design process. [1] The photocopier and commercial printing would open up… Read More
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England
18 May 2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18 May 2022
During the upheavals of the Civil War, Westminster Abbey had functioned as the church of the state for the Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of Charles II, the Abbey resumed its historic role as the coronation church for English monarchs. [1] Parliament voted towards restoring the fabric, reinstituting its monarchical function… Read More
Abelardo Morell
6 April 2023
Abelardo Morell6 April 2023
– Rebecca Connor Reading
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
interior DMC