Category: drawing techniques & materials
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
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World
21 February 2024
Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World21 February 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 February 2024
DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture14 February 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
7 February 2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design7 February 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 January 2024
Careful Crudeness31 January 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 December 2023
DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura13 December 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
6 December 2023
DMJ – The Stereoautograph6 December 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 October 2023
DMJ – Drawing Instruments from Sir John Soane’s Office25 October 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 October 2023
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities10 October 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
2 October 2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective2 October 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
7 August 2023
Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers7 August 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 July 2023
What does a drawing sound like?20 July 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 July 2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11 July 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 July 2023
William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations10 July 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 June 2023
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape29 June 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 May 2023
Architectural manuals and Pacific speculations23 May 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
2 May 2023
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop2 May 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
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia
26 April 2023
Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia26 April 2023
In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More
Materia 5: Timber
18 April 2023
Materia 5: Timber18 April 2023
This text is the final instalment in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The language of architectural drawing, although appearing to promise an infinite arena for self-projection, ultimately fails to contain and express… Read More
Abelardo Morell
6 April 2023
Abelardo Morell6 April 2023
In 2006 Abelardo Morell was invited by a collector with a Palazzo in Venice to photograph a camera obscura image of the Grand Canal in his mother’s bedroom. Morell returned to the city a year later. His host, pointing at a window in a Canaletto painting, said he knew a… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31 March 2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31 March 2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25 March 2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25 March 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
Open Call: Storytellers, Observed theoretical & imaginary urban form politics Perspective