Category: office cultures

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Zoe Zenghelis

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

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

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

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Cameron Lintott

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

Aldo Rossi: The First Sketch and the Final Drawing

Aldo Rossi: The First Sketch and the Final Drawing

Andrea Leonardi

The following letter was sent to the Drawing Matter editors by Andrea Leonardi, a member of Rossi’s office for nine years.   A few days ago my dear friend Maurizio Diton, sent me an article he wrote for you in October 2019, ‘The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Fabrizio Gallanti and Mauricio Pezo

This is the fourth 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 Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von… Read More

Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued

Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued

Pierre du Prey

When Drawing Matter recently reproduced a preliminary ground plan for Combe House near Gittisham, Devon, by John Soane, I had a moment’s sudden recollection. Ptolemy Dean’s penetrating analysis of this precious if battered sheet of paper – entirely in the astonishingly fluid and energetic hand of the architect – set me to search… Read More

OMA in Scheveningen

OMA in Scheveningen

Willem Jan Neutelings

Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More

James Gowan: The Sheet for the Job

James Gowan: The Sheet for the Job

Jantje Engels

The elevation of the Engineering Faculty in Leicester, a building by James Stirling and James Gowan, is in the centre of the tracing paper: a drawing composed of vertical, horizontal and diagonal black lines. A series of height lines and dimensions have been applied effectively, showing that the construction is… Read More

Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views

Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views

John Tuomey

Rear Views I joined the Stirling office in September 1976, working late hours through the length of four years until my return to Dublin towards the end of 1980. Straight out of college and into my first proper job, the critical years in my formation as an architect. I had… Read More

Working with Asplund

Working with Asplund

Herbert Korn

Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More

Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer

Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer

Sarah Handelman and Jaume Mayol

This drawing for a house in Mallorca joins a number of sketches we made to understand the project. Each space is made of separate elements. To understand the space you need to dive into each element, and to understand each element you need to be in the space. To draw… Read More

O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation

O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation

Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey

John Tuomey: Let me tell you the story of this drawing. We were at one of those despairing moments when we were putting together our book Space for Architecture and feeling that we had never achieved anything of any substance. We didn’t have a lot of work going at that particular moment,… Read More

Allies & Morrison: The Art of Architecture

Allies & Morrison: The Art of Architecture

Gabor Gallov

Allies and Morrison is an office that has held onto its identity throughout its growth. When I entered the firm, the culture of the office was steeped in a careful, polite and thoughtful style of drawings. The muted drawing style could be observed in the early sketches of the partners… Read More

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Helen Thomas

In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More

Drawing Culture at SOM New York

Drawing Culture at SOM New York

Tom Killian

When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More

Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold

Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold

Biba Dow

Giorgio Morandi’s work focused on studying again and again a small group of domestic objects – vases, jugs, bottles – in his home in Bologna. During his adult life, he produced a large quantity of paintings and etchings which together build up a shimmering representation of his field of focus.… Read More

Next Year in Yemen

Next Year in Yemen

Thomas Padmanabhan

‘Next year, there will be a civil war in Yemen. Please lend me the money so I can go now,’ I had the wit to ask my parents. It was after my first year in architecture school, not knowing that this journey would come to define me as an architect.… Read More

The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s

The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s

Maurizio Diton

Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More

Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard

Harvey Wiley Corbett on Architectural Models of Cardboard

Between April and August 1922 the American journal Pencil Points printed a four-part series by the architect Harvey Wiley Corbett on architectural models that were made of cardboard. According to Corbett, cardboard was a medium for modern times, providing an economical and labour-saving way for the architect to produce models for study… Read More

Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’

Gio Ponti: ‘Come for Porchetta’

Niall Hobhouse

The Milanese architect Gio Ponti typically arrived at his office very early in the morning and would use the quiet interlude before his colleagues appeared to write a succession of letters – to friends and associates, to clients and contractors, to his associate editors at Domus or Stile, to his fellow architects Le… Read More

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Drawing with Rafael Moneo, Madrid 1984

Stan Allen

I arrived in Rafael Moneo’s Madrid office in early 1984. I had graduated from Cooper Union two years earlier and spent 18 months working for Richard Meier in New York.  I met Moneo in 1978 when he was teaching at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, but I don’t… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Zaha Hadid: Kurfürstendamm

Michael Wolfson

This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More

Gowan and Stirling

Gowan and Stirling

Fred Scott

This odd-shaped, yellowed analysis drawing by James Gowan, drawn directly onto heavy paper isn’t dated, and was probably added to years after the drawing was nearly complete. Ellis Woodman describes the drawing as ‘that drawing that James always kept in the box with his sketchbooks’. Unusually, when I first saw… Read More

Boompjes II

Boompjes II

Stefano de Martino

Triptych This ink drawing was to be printed as a silkscreen and that is when the conversation with Bernard Ruygrok, the printer, started. His place in Amsterdam was amazing. We had several meetings to discuss colors because he had to do everything by hand. At some point I had a smaller version of the ink drawing printed on clear… Read More