Category: drawing techniques & materials
Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra
20.05.2024
Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra20.05.2024
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
08.05.2024
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation08.05.2024
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
24.04.2024
A Bath for Immortality24.04.2024
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)
15.04.2024
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)15.04.2024
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
DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish
20.03.2024
DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish20.03.2024
– 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
13.03.2024
DMJ – Template and Talisman13.03.2024
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
26.02.2024
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping26.02.2024
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
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World
21.02.2024
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World21.02.2024
The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Caterina Pincioni, secretary at… Read More
DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture
14.02.2024
DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture14.02.2024
The grid and the squared paper have played an important role in architectural practice, both in analysing and measuring what already exists (sites, monuments, etc.) and in organising and modularising the graphic development of the design process. The use of the square grid is generally linked to Greek civilization, mathematics,… Read More
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design
07.02.2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design07.02.2024
The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Between 1971 and 1973,… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31.01.2024
Careful Crudeness31.01.2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura
13.12.2023
DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura13.12.2023
Antonio Canaletto used a camera obscura to make careful sketches of the buildings of Venice. The Gallerie dell’ Accademia has a quaderno, a notebook containing 140 pages of these sketches, which provided the raw material for paintings made in the 1730s, as well as finished drawings that Canaletto offered for sale.… Read More
DMJ – The Stereoautograph
06.12.2023
DMJ – The Stereoautograph06.12.2023
The Zeiss Stereoautograph 1914 Bild II is a mammoth device (Fig.1). It weighs over 400kg and has the same footprint as a Smart Car. When it was retired and donated to the Zeiss Archive in 2004, the Technical University of Hanover had to remove part of its roof in order to lift… Read More
DMJ – Drawing Instruments from Sir John Soane’s Office
25.10.2023
DMJ – Drawing Instruments from Sir John Soane’s Office25.10.2023
This display of drawing instruments, which can be seen in the newly restored Drawing Office at Sir John Soane’s Museum, rather charmingly evokes the atmosphere of the office when in the early nineteenth century it was the busy epicentre of Soane’s architectural practice, filled with his young apprentices and clerks.[1]… Read More
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities
10.10.2023
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities10.10.2023
Judit Reigl was ninety-two years old in 2015 when she started Dance of Death, her transcendent series of small-scale vanitas drawings. Having reached a stage where she could barely see her own pencil marks, Reigl found skulls to be a ready subject. She said she had drawn many skulls in… Read More
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective
02.10.2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective02.10.2023
This essay discusses three enigmatic one-point perspective drawings. The first was made by the precocious Prussian architect and teacher Friedrich Gilly, the second by Alberto Sartoris as a young student of architecture in Geneva, and the third by the relatively unknown modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. These drawings have been… Read More
Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers
07.08.2023
Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers07.08.2023
Preferring the sterile white look, most British modernist architects shied away from colour, considering it to be the domain of the interior decorator—the ‘woman’s role’. But Patrick Gwynne (1913–2003) always loved to use colour in his designs, with sensitivity and knowledge. As a budding architect in the mid-1930s, Gwynne purchased… Read More
What Does a Drawing Sound Like?
20.07.2023
What Does a Drawing Sound Like?20.07.2023
Drawings in Mechanization Takes Command almost clank. Designs for a threshing machine in the 1770s, plans for a Mechanical Reaper submitted to the British Patent Office in 1811, and Cyrus McCormick’s subsequent design for the American farmer, all included iron wheels, heavy plate, and flailing chains. Those drawings selected by… Read More
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11.07.2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11.07.2023
What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More
William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations
10.07.2023
William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations10.07.2023
This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. The town of Torquay dates from the days when… Read More
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape
29.06.2023
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape29.06.2023
– Stan Allen and Marina Correia
‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More
Architectural Manuals and Pacific Speculations
23.05.2023
Architectural Manuals and Pacific Speculations23.05.2023
Lodged in an architectural archive at the bottom of the world, [1] Joshua Kirby’s 1755 book, Perspective of Architecture: a work entirely new […] announces that ‘All those lines that are boundaries to the several parts of Architecture, are either straight or circular; and therefore, those two different kinds of… Read More
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop
02.05.2023
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop02.05.2023
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh
This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings exploring the relationship between form, space and programme. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25.03.2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25.03.2024
– Julian Escudero Geltman
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
theoretical & imaginary urban form politics Perspective Open Call: Storytellers, Observed