Category: drawing histories
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
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
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints
12 October 2022
Two Way Traffic: Japanese Woodblock Prints12 October 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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