Category: drawing techniques & materials
Protected: Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper
22.06.2026
Protected: Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper22.06.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Invented from Copies
18.06.2026
Invented from Copies18.06.2026
In 1980, Fred A. Stitt, the doyen of American authors of handbooks on the technical and managerial aspects of architectural practice, defined the distinction between drawing and copy drafting (to use the American spelling of draughting) in uncompromising terms: Drawing is an originating process: a creative, aesthetic, and problem-solving process.… Read More
Protected: Yes, And
11.06.2026
Protected: Yes, And11.06.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Concept of Proof
05.06.2026
Concept of Proof05.06.2026
We talk of the invisible drawings that birth a project, but words persistently catalyse and crystallise thought, providing spur or anchor for the meandering of mind and hand in the extrication of architectures. Publication, specification, contract, critique—words. Our history and very conceptual frameworks rely on the productive and ‘dangerous inversions… Read More
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds
04.06.2026
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds04.06.2026
In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes the first hundred pages of his bestselling 1980 novel as a form of penance, ‘for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterwards.’[1] Beyond creating an easy heuristic for who should or should not descend further into the world of… Read More
Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing
25.05.2026
Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing25.05.2026
The first thing to be said about the drawings of Carlos Bedoya is that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, or a case for the lost art of drawing by hand. The architects of PRODUCTORA work in the present, with all the tools and techniques available to them. The… Read More
Printed Matters
21.05.2026
Printed Matters 21.05.2026
Few objects stage anticipation as effectively as a box, especially one whose contents are revealed slowly, piece by piece. The sense of something concealed within prepares the viewer for an experience at once intimate and tactile, one that is focused by the box itself, but that—in the act of unpacking—becomes… Read More
Drawing Superpositions
15.05.2026
Drawing Superpositions15.05.2026
When drawing plans for a project that does not primarily form architectural space through solid mass, the question of what a line signifies becomes especially critical. This drawing faced the challenge of representing an object that produces light and sound, situated in the public space of Vårby Gård, a suburb… Read More
Protected: Three Drawings
14.05.2026
Protected: Three Drawings14.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Architectural Drawing
14.05.2026
Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Architectural Drawing14.05.2026
The following text is one of the entries included in the book Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2025) edited by Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending. The book, presented in the form of a dictionary, examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts, from acquisition to will. Each… Read More
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni
06.05.2026
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni06.05.2026
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: 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
A Taste for Architectural Drawings
01.04.2026
A Taste for Architectural Drawings01.04.2026
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
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
Protected: Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process
23.06.2026
Protected: Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 23.06.2026
– Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
elevation model plan sketch theoretical & imaginary