Category: drawing techniques & materials
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing
22.03.2021
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing22.03.2021
‘House’ by Marie-José Van Hee is drawn on a sheet of trace, the edge of which is visible at the top, offset from the plain white ground for photographing or scanning. It is a freehand drawing that uses black graphite for lines, to hatch, shade, and achieve gradations of roughly rendered… Read More
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’
18.03.2021
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’18.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life. Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things
08.03.2021
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things08.03.2021
The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More
Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation
05.03.2021
Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation05.03.2021
Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise
01.03.2021
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise01.03.2021
Melting reality, ancient history and fantasy into one, the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi hold an unparalleled allure that continues to entrance and captivate. They offer an escape into imagined and unknown worlds; each drawing an organism of its own, containing an immense depth of spatial layering and an extraordinary… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS
25.02.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS25.02.2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
This is the seventh in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt
24.02.2021
Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt24.02.2021
Review Three times a week a package arrives in Somerset with another Practice Monograph, and the generous proposal that we might want to add it to the library at Drawing Matter. This is clearly an old story – somewhere we have a copy of one of John Soane’s endless books… Read More
Re-presenting the Rococo
24.02.2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24.02.2021
In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More
Take One: Architects on Drawing
23.02.2021
Take One: Architects on Drawing23.02.2021
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
In Search of an Honest Map
22.02.2021
In Search of an Honest Map22.02.2021
We don’t experience place as maps would have us believe. We might technically exist within the map, an orientation marker besieged by the total sum of data, every landmark, park and street swarming around us at all times. But our perspective is only partial – a patchwork of neighbourhoods, structures… Read More
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space
02.02.2021
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space02.02.2021
Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More
Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin
29.01.2021
Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin29.01.2021
The following conversation between the editors of Accattone and Quentin Nicolaï was first published in Accattone 6 (2019). It documents research carried out by Quentin Nicolaï in Abomey, Benin, between January 2014 and June 2018. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the magazine’s editors for allowing us reproduce… Read More
Two Early Paintings with OMA
25.01.2021
Two Early Paintings with OMA25.01.2021
Here, Zoe Zenghelis, painter and founding member of OMA, recalls the making of two paintings now in the Drawing Matter collection. The first, pictured below, is an aerial view of the unbuilt Hotel Therma, and the second is a version of OMA’s entry to the Parc de la Villette competition.… Read More
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction
15.01.2021
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction15.01.2021
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor series may rightly be called barbaric. ‘Barbarism? Yes indeed,’ writes Walter Benjamin in his 1933 essay, Experience and Poverty. ‘We say this in order to introduce a new positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the… Read More
Architecture at the Edge
13.01.2021
Architecture at the Edge13.01.2021
– Craig Moller and Marco Moro
The following is a conversation between Marco Moro and Craig Moller, New Zealand-born architect and author of the drawing pictured above. Moller made the drawing while in a design studio taught by Mark Wigley in 1985, while the latter was about to finish his doctoral thesis within the newly established… Read More
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation
08.01.2021
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation08.01.2021
Techniques of architectural drawing have been developed according to the physics of light and our perception of its effects. From the origins of two-dimensional representation – often mythologized in the act of tracing a projected silhouette on a flat surface – to practices of atmospheric simulation in rendering, recognized patterns of light have become essential in the communication of architecture’s spatial… Read More
The Values of Profiles (1951)
08.01.2021
The Values of Profiles (1951)08.01.2021
Provoked by the assertion of rational architecture, the beginnings of modern non-figurative art coincide in time with the exclusion from the world of living forms of cornices and profiles, the most evidently ‘abstract’ elements of ancient architecture. At least two reasons may be relevant to this singular phenomenon: one is… Read More
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints
21.12.2020
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints21.12.2020
They began to bloom on websites a couple of years or so ago – stretching out on social media, unfurling in the arts sections. Pale alien shapes suspended in deep blue: something like lightning flattened in a flower press; a sleeping creature emerging from a cloud of coral; a spectral… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up
17.12.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up17.12.2020
Hair, silky, wavy or coiled, somewhere, is felt by us all. It is one of the first things we play with, we shape and mold, unconsciously or artfully. Beginning as a line, slack and tentative, a hair appears as a strike of fine ink. Collected and carefully teased each strand… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque
16.12.2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque16.12.2020
– Fabrizio Gallanti and Andrés Jaque
This is the fifth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Andrés Jaque, founder of the Office for Political Innovation… Read More
Drawing, Collaging, Rendering
09.12.2020
Drawing, Collaging, Rendering09.12.2020
When the ‘hard-line drawing’ has become so synonymous with the image of the architect it is easy to forget that the convenience of the everyday pen is relatively recent. For most of the long history of the world’s second-oldest profession, pen, paint and ink were reserved for competition boards or… Read More
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints
07.12.2020
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints07.12.2020
An intriguing Italian Renaissance drawing from the mid-sixteenth century has recently received critical attention through Drawing Matter. [1] Both the recto and the verso of the paper sheet have an ancient temple plan in perspective in a landscape setting, drawn in brown ink and attributed to the Sangallo circle as… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered
05.12.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered05.12.2020
– Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga
Around 200 AD, a map of the city of Rome was carved on marble at a scale of approximately 1:240. It measured 18 meters wide by 13 meters high and comprised 150 marble slabs hung on an interior wall of the Templum Pacis. The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan, as… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch
16.03.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch16.03.2021
– Patrick Lynch
This is the eighth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode we share Instagram posts by Patrick Lynch in which he describes his experience… Read More
sketch Pan Scroll Zoom (series)