Category: drawing techniques & materials
Protected: Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition, at the Belvedere 21
19 November 2024
Protected: Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition, at the Belvedere 2119 November 2024
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments
14 November 2024
DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments14 November 2024
Instruments of Building in Ancient Rome Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, portrays being an architect (architectus) in ancient Rome as a daunting task. The knowledge of the architect, he notes, must encompass the understanding of geometry, engineering, optics, history, philosophy, astronomy, and even music and medicine. At a… Read More
DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing
24 October 2024
DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing24 October 2024
There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More
Drawing Without Erasing
21 October 2024
Drawing Without Erasing21 October 2024
The following text first appeared in Drawing without Erasing and Other Essays, by Flores & Prats (Barcelona: Puente editores, 2023), 16-23. Not so long ago, a journalist interviewed us for the British magazine Architecture Today, and the resulting article was called ‘Dirty Drawings’. This suggestive title might bring to mind a… Read More
OMA: Collaborators—Allies
30 September 2024
OMA: Collaborators—Allies30 September 2024
This is the fifth post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Notes on Nabokov
19 September 2024
Notes on Nabokov19 September 2024
Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter
12 September 2024
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter12 September 2024
– Editors and Chloé Parent
Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… Read More
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School
6 September 2024
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School6 September 2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project
29 August 2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project29 August 2024
This is the fourth post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida
1 August 2024
DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida1 August 2024
In the Drawing Matter collection there is a camera lucida that belonged to Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) (Figs 1–4,6).[1] The camera lucida is an instrument for drawing from life, patented in 1806 by the versatile English chemist and physicist William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828).[2] The term camera lucida (‘well-lit room’) is… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15 July 2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15 July 2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations
11 July 2024
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations11 July 2024
During the 1950s and 1960s, the T-3 research group at the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center produced the first drawings of what is now known as computational fluid dynamics. Using the prowess of early electronic computers—initially developed for the Manhattan Project, the T-3 lab, working under the auspices of the… Read More
Protected: A Will to the City
19 June 2024
Protected: A Will to the City19 June 2024
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
DMJ – Burning Drawing
6 June 2024
DMJ – Burning Drawing6 June 2024
This article documents a series of material studies of prepared surfaces that use laser cutters as instruments of drawing—and, at times, of weathering. They are part of a study that explores, through texts and images, the role that islands have played as topoi of imagination and experimentation. I begin these island stories… Read More
OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds
31 May 2024
OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds31 May 2024
This is the second post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra
20 May 2024
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra20 May 2024
The Alhambra architectural models reflect the circumstances in which they were created, during the last years of the Romantic movement, when artists and patrons were fascinated by the diffuse idea of the ‘Orient’, somewhat embodied by the Alhambra. This part-myth, part-real palace was the ultimate destination for Romantic travellers and… Read More
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation
8 May 2024
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation8 May 2024
Architecture is a promiscuous practice that touches and learns from many other disciplines. Architects have associated their studies with other specialisations in the sciences, arts and humanities and many of the aspects of architectural education draw upon and defer to those realms. To make architecture one needs to gather ideas… Read More
A Bath for Immortality
24 April 2024
A Bath for Immortality24 April 2024
It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)
15 April 2024
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)15 April 2024
Snap, crackle, pop. Oh, that horrible sound of unravelling a roll of architectural drawings on old dried-up tracing paper from the nineteenth century. Slowly unfurling the brown brittle sheet, it cracks and shatters, little bits drop off in flakes, littering the table and floor like confetti. The experience feels like… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25 March 2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25 March 2024
Andrea Branzi died on 9 October 2023 aged 84. The impact of one of his seminal works, No-Stop City, has been felt far and wide within architectural discourse. Since its production between 1967 and 1972, the drawings and collages of No-Stop City have haunted the camps within architectural academia that… Read More
DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish
20 March 2024
DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish20 March 2024
– Francisco Javier Girón Sierra
At the beginning of the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Juan Bautista Villalpando spent his last years of life in Rome obsessively working on an interpretation of the Temple of Solomon. When he came to the question of how to represent its plan, he envisioned a new, almost ghostly, way… Read More
DMJ – Template and Talisman
13 March 2024
DMJ – Template and Talisman13 March 2024
For a time, Aldo Van Eyck kept this little amulet in his pocket. An alabaster disc, inlaid with mother of pearl and jet, 30mm in diameter, it is coin-sized, weighted against and warmed by the heat of the body, passing though the fingers. Its uses are both symbolic and instrumental.… Read More
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping
26 February 2024
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping26 February 2024
This text is an excerpt from Shallow Time: The Burren (Dpr-Barcelona and Irish Architecture Foundation, 2023), 73-74, written by Tom Cookson. The text is reproduced with permission from the Irish Architecture Foundation. How to communicate the topographic nature of landscape and lived experience on a map reproduced on paper? The composition… Read More
PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an ideo-aesthetic technique
7 November 2024
PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an ideo-aesthetic technique7 November 2024
– Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo
It was 2005, a moment of crescent belief in technical progress and modernity prior to the upcoming financial crisis that took place two years later. The early 2000s saw the progressive implementation of photorealistic modes of architectural representation through which firms were able to intensify the instrumentalisation of spatial design.… Read More
presentation Open Call: Storytellers, Observed competition