Category: drawing histories
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 1970
17.01.2023
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 197017.01.2023
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
09.12.2022
DMJ – ‘All the varieties of Nature’s works under ground’: the Geological Imagination of Alexander Pope09.12.2022
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
15.11.2022
DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge15.11.2022
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
19.10.2022
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism19.10.2022
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
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022
22.09.2022
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 202222.09.2022
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
16.09.2022
After the Revolution: Dugourc in Spain16.09.2022
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
14.09.2022
Dugourc’s Playing Cards14.09.2022
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
12.09.2022
Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle12.09.2022
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
25.08.2022
William Burges: Architectural drawing25.08.2022
– 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
17.08.2022
Turning Point: The US Embassy in Dublin17.08.2022
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
10.06.2022
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House10.06.2022
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
02.06.2022
Opportunism02.06.2022
– 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
18.05.2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18.05.2022
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
Robert Adam: The Long Gallery at Syon
13.05.2022
Robert Adam: The Long Gallery at Syon13.05.2022
– Stephen Astley, Adriano Aymonino, Markus Lähteenmäki and Frances Sands
On 18 December 2015, Frances Sands and Stephen Astley took out two leather-bound volumes from the Robert Adam Archive and laid them on the long table in the first-floor library at Sir John Soane’s museum. Adriano Aymonino and Markus Lähteenmäki, the initiators and editors of the Soane Oral Project, joined… Read More
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary
09.05.2022
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary09.05.2022
From eighteenth century primitive huts to the rise of barn living in the 1970s, buildings have served as the conceptual boundary between primordial formlessness and the organised world. But what if architecture begins with the very nature that it was invented to exclude? In 1971, the Madrilenian architect Fernando Higueras… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19.04.2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19.04.2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel
14.04.2022
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel14.04.2022
The plans of the Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel were drawn nearly two hundred years apart, and yet they both speak to the Ruskian timelessness of the ruin. The temple and chapel are representative of their respective ages, with the former alluding to Romanticism’s longing for a pastoral past free… Read More
Entering the Imperial Palace
16.03.2022
Entering the Imperial Palace16.03.2022
‘What a subject for John Martin!’ exclaimed a passer-by, as the hungry flames flickered up York Minster. Maybe they had in mind his apocalyptic painting The Fall of Nineveh, exhibited that same year at the Western Exchange on Old Bond Street and reproduced widely as a mezzotint print. Unbeknown to… Read More
What’s a Bludder Sketch?
28.02.2022
What’s a Bludder Sketch?28.02.2022
As a timid foreigner in the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, shuffling through hundreds of important-looking drawings, I stumbled across a funny little sketch in whose lines I found some humanity. It was made by Bengt Lindroos in 1981 and is an imagined view of his office with the… Read More
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture
21.02.2022
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture21.02.2022
The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘The Cornice’, GTA Papers 6 (2021). It is one of the outcomes of the work done in preparation for the exhibition The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Architecture and Art, which was on show at the Graphische Sammlung of ETH… Read More
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan
01.02.2022
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan01.02.2022
Writing in Cities of Hope (1993), the historian Conrad Hamann relates that, on mentioning to Robert Venturi the name of the Australian postmodernist architect Peter Corrigan, the first words from Venturi’s mouth were ‘Oh God! Corrigan!’. Yet it must be made clear that to Corrigan, and to his wife and… Read More
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints
12.10.2022
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints12.10.2022
– Alex Faulkner
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
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