Category: drawing techniques & materials
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni
06.05.2026
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni06.05.2026
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Protected: Concept of Proof
05.05.2026
Protected: Concept of Proof05.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Architectural Drawing
01.05.2026
Protected: Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Architectural Drawing01.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The ‘Typewriter’ Drawing
01.05.2026
The ‘Typewriter’ Drawing01.05.2026
The ‘Typewriter’ drawing is made on brown paper mounted on a black backing, its surface carrying both the mechanical impressions of a typewriter and the analogue traces of a black pen layered above them. But unlike later typewriter drawings, which use typed characters as grids, codes, or proto-digital marks, this… Read More
Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing
27.04.2026
Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing27.04.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Drawing Motion as Thought
15.04.2026
Protected: Drawing Motion as Thought15.04.2026
– MRND
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Wedging a Shrine
10.04.2026
Wedging a Shrine10.04.2026
This drawing by an unknown author can be appreciated from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it depicts a jinja, a Japanese Shinto shrine. From a historical point of view, the image can be read as an ezu—an illustrated map from the late Edo period (mid-nineteenth century)—featuring premodern calligraphy and the… Read More
Tracing Air with Light
03.04.2026
Tracing Air with Light03.04.2026
When architects design buildings, they simultaneously construct environments for human habitation and activity. Whether through the warmth emanating from a hearth or the breeze generated by an air-conditioning unit, architecture is always implicated in the modulation of environmental conditions. However, environmental control—along with the elements that it seeks to temper—remains… Read More
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
Shadows in the work of Canaletto
23.03.2026
Shadows in the work of Canaletto23.03.2026
Canaletto used a camera obscura to trace the architecture of Venice on site.[1] He used the camera sketches in turn to produce finished drawings and paintings. Fig.1 reproduces two pages from Canaletto’s sketchbook, his quaderno, now in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. They show the Campo and Church of SS Giovanni… Read More
André des Gachons: Weather Warning
19.03.2026
André des Gachons: Weather Warning19.03.2026
The recent publication, La Veille du ciel: aquarelles météorologiques (Phénomène éditions), one of the most beautiful books published in 2025, gathers together forty years of daily weather reports by André des Gachons on the skies above the small rural commune of La Chaussée-sur-Marne, in eastern France. Des Gachons remained subjective… Read More
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
And in the shadows, the section fades
13.03.2026
And in the shadows, the section fades13.03.2026
On the black cartridge, a veil of pigments builds up, articulates an edge and fades into the depth. And yet it is the edge that meets me first, together with all the other edges that are layered upon each other. Cascading contrasts of white and black. Or: of brightness and darkness. Now… Read More
Sam Jacob: On Collage (Talk, Workshop + Exhibition)
12.03.2026
Sam Jacob: On Collage (Talk, Workshop + Exhibition)12.03.2026
– Editors
In early February, Drawing Matter organised a series of public events with the architect Sam Jacob exploring the uses of collage in architectural representations. On the Friday (6 February), Sam gave a talk on his personal interests in collage, weaving a narrative from Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that… Read More
Shadowed plans
11.03.2026
Shadowed plans11.03.2026
Drawing Matter holds in its collection a plan by Superstudio architects Carlo Chiappi and Adolfo Natalini for the 1967 competition for the restoration of the Fortezza da Basso—a 16th-century fort in Florence—and its transformation into a National Centre for Arts and Crafts.[1] The drawing combines traditional plan-making techniques with remarkable… Read More
Massinissa Selmani
09.03.2026
Massinissa Selmani 09.03.2026
The nomination of the Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani for the 2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp was an official acknowledgement that a practice grounded primarily in pencil drawing on paper on a modest scale can constitute a major contribution to contemporary art.[1] In Selmani’s abbreviated aesthetic, weighty ideas are carried by the… Read More
DMJ – Death Masks
06.03.2026
DMJ – Death Masks06.03.2026
This series of drawings is part of a larger project titled Tracking Blood Meridian, which explores the work of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. The sketchbook pages are developed as studies for landscape-like death masks that relate to members of the nineteenth-century Glanton gang, on whose exploits McCarthy’s 1985 novel… Read More
Engraving Shadows
19.02.2026
Engraving Shadows19.02.2026
In all relief printmaking techniques such as woodcut (in which cuts are made along the plank of a smooth piece of wood) and linocut (involving, like woodcuts, steel gouges with U- and V-shaped cutting tips), as well as wood engraving and even the humble potato-cut, what you leave uncut on… Read More
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York
09.02.2026
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York09.02.2026
Steinberg is for me, first of all, the New Yorker magazine—one of the most intelligent and open American publications, with a very distinct graphic style that includes a generous use of drawings and cartoons, born and fed by the amazingly rich cultural landscape of New York City. I see New York… Read More
Arrows
19.01.2026
Arrows19.01.2026
The small drawing that adorns the title page of F. R. S. Yorke’s 1937 study, The Modern House in England, is typical for its time. It shows an aerial perspective, made in thin black lines, of a conventional modern house with all its attributes. Cubic in shape, the house is… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop
15.01.2026
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop15.01.2026
– Raffael Baur, Patricia Guaita and Matthew Wells
For a fourth year, Drawing Matter hosted students from ENAC EPFL for a week-long workshop on survey drawings—this time not in a Somerset farmyard, but in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 400 yards east of the archive. The workshop was organised by Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur in collaboration with Drawing Matter,… Read More
On Measurement: A Survey of Florence
12.01.2026
On Measurement: A Survey of Florence12.01.2026
The following text is an extract from a longer essay entitled ‘De re mensura: Surveying Practice in Quattrocento Painting’—which the author completed at the Warburg Institute in the autumn of 2025—looking at Renaissance perspective painting to consider how practices of surveying informed the development of perspective as an artistic and intellectual pursuit. *… Read More
To Table
11.12.2025
To Table11.12.2025
To table is to create the conditions for collective presence through food, space, event, and ritual; it is to host a gathering where practices and events—ranging from the everyday to the ceremonial, the spontaneous to the planned—become acts of social meaning-making. Also, as a verb, ‘to table’ conventionally carries a dual… Read More
A Taste for Architectural Drawings
01.04.2026
A Taste for Architectural Drawings01.04.2026
– Neil Bingham
The smelling and tasting of historical architectural drawings have been overlooked by scholars as valuable research tools, particularly in matters of dating and authorship. In this short discussion—a foretaste of a future volume, or two, that I intend to write on the subject—I demonstrate that drawings made by architects, including… Read More
theoretical & imaginary DMC