Category: drawing histories
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’
18 March 2021
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’18 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life. Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More
The Floor Plan of a Room
17 March 2021
The Floor Plan of a Room17 March 2021
Drawn from memory, the floor plan of a room in which two plan chests stand apart like two rectangular islands, plain-faced in plan but each one a tower of uncountable lines, paper upon paper suspended and preserved within the pellucid sleeves of polyester where they lie dormant and entombed as… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem
11 March 2021
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem11 March 2021
I gaze at the screen, engrossed in the German horror film Der Golem (originally released in 1915 and reworked for reissue in 1920), a masterpiece of performance art. This cinematographic journey is my latest odyssey into the work of Hans Poelzig. The film catalogues his lesser-known work in the art… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11 March 2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
The MARS Group’s Plan for London, 1933-1944
8 March 2021
The MARS Group’s Plan for London, 1933-19448 March 2021
Collaboration within the field of architecture is as important as ever before. Construction projects grow increasingly complex, and pressing social issues need addressing. Yet we think of architects as unique and outstanding personalities that profoundly shape our built environment. This image of the architect as ‘genius’ is more present among… Read More
Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ
8 March 2021
Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ8 March 2021
Charles Stanley Peach’s watercolour over pencil painting is executed by overlaying two forms of religious representation: figural images over a church plan reflecting a ceiling plan. The figurative depictions narrate accounts of Christianity through various portrayals of Christ; the most prominent being God, benevolent, and Jesus crucified. Other portraits of… Read More
Make me Hyper-Real: image ethics and the architectural visualisation
5 March 2021
Make me Hyper-Real: image ethics and the architectural visualisation5 March 2021
Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique
4 March 2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique4 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise
1 March 2021
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise1 March 2021
Melting reality, ancient history and fantasy into one, the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi hold an unparalleled allure that continues to entrance and captivate. They offer an escape into imagined and unknown worlds; each drawing an organism of its own, containing an immense depth of spatial layering and an extraordinary… Read More
Architecture’s Mirror Stage
26 February 2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26 February 2021
Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt
24 February 2021
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt24 February 2021
Review Three times a week a package arrives in Somerset with another Practice Monograph, and the generous proposal that we might want to add it to the library at Drawing Matter. This is clearly an old story – somewhere we have a copy of one of John Soane’s endless books… Read More
Re-presenting the Rococo
24 February 2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24 February 2021
In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More
Take One: Architects on Drawing
23 February 2021
Take One: Architects on Drawing23 February 2021
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
In search of an honest map
22 February 2021
In search of an honest map22 February 2021
We don’t experience place as maps would have us believe. We might technically exist within the map, an orientation marker besieged by the total sum of data, every landmark, park and street swarming around us at all times. But our perspective is only partial – a patchwork of neighbourhoods, structures… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17 February 2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17 February 2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy
9 February 2021
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy9 February 2021
John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More
The Architect and the Matador
8 February 2021
The Architect and the Matador8 February 2021
On one sheet, a matador;on the other, a design,with measurements for a cathedral pier. What unites these drawingsis provenance:both, apparently, executedby the architectEugène Viollet-le-Ducin meetings. As Viollet-le-Duc’s mind wanderedfrom doodle to design,my attention,beholding the drawings,is drawn between the two sheets; drawn, by the insistently connective impulseof looking,into associations. Between architect… Read More
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery
5 February 2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery5 February 2021
A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space
2 February 2021
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space2 February 2021
Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More
Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center
1 February 2021
Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center1 February 2021
The landmark skyscrapers of SOM, the deconstructivism of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and the corporate modernist master plan of the World Trade Center all have something in common: long before they were constructed, they were represented in drawings by Carlos Diniz. In 1962, the architect Minoru Yamasaki hired Diniz… Read More
Elliott Glushak vs. The City of New York
27 January 2021
Elliott Glushak vs. The City of New York27 January 2021
Is an architectural rendering the work of an artist? Or is it just a skilled service, like a plumber or plasterer? This was the question that was fought out in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in 1958. At stake was the payment of New York sales… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse
22 January 2021
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse22 January 2021
In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing
18 January 2021
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing18 January 2021
‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26 March 2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26 March 2021
– Paul Notley
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
DMC plan housing autographicals (editorial project)