Category: on their own work
What’s in a Detail?
10.09.2026
What’s in a Detail? 10.09.2026
The following text appears in the recently published book The Drawing and the Space: Reflections on 10 Years of Design Research and Education, edited by Thierry Lagrange, Jo Van Den Berghe, Enrico Miglietta, and Liselotte Vroman. The book brings together a decade of work developed through design research and pedagogical… Read More
The House Without Character
07.09.2026
The House Without Character07.09.2026
– Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song
Ever since I first encountered Arnulf Rainer’s Overpaintings in an exhibition, I was captivated by them. In 1954, he started to draw with oil crayons over photographs of himself, directly and spontaneously reacting to his own image. They are extremely powerful and honest, revealing a fundamental truth that photography on… Read More
The Analogous City: Panel
04.09.2026
The Analogous City: Panel04.09.2026
Having been asked to write about the panel exhibited at the Venice Biennale—entitled The analogous city, a joint work carried out with my friends Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart—it is worthwhile, I feel, posing a few general questions that arise prior to experiments or results of this kind.… Read More
Reclaiming the Visual in Architectural Theory
31.08.2026
Reclaiming the Visual in Architectural Theory31.08.2026
Among the most influential books of architectural theory in the last three centuries is the Essai sur l’Architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier, published in 1753. The book’s goal was to establish the foundational principles of architecture, and thus the rules for designing proper buildings. The author argued that these rules descend… Read More
Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation
24.08.2026
Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation24.08.2026
– Michael Gold and Dalibor Vesely
The following text, ‘The Dialogue of Representation’ by Dalibor Vesely, was published in People in Architecture, the book featuring the exhibition of work by Michael Gold’s AA Unit 5 students held at the Architectural Association, 4–29 October 1983. Read a response to the exhibition by Peter Wilson here. Drawing Matter… Read More
A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage
21.08.2026
A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage21.08.2026
– Koenraad Van Cleempoel and Joshua Kempen
The revitalisation of the Hasselt Beguinage and its transformation into the Faculty of Architecture and Arts has created an opportunity to reconsider the role of drawing as a critical mode of inquiry in adaptive reuse. Rather than treating drawing as a purely representational tool, the project frames it as an… Read More
Atlas of Seyðisfjörður
20.08.2026
Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 20.08.2026
This collection of drawings documents a series of studies undertaken in the town of Seyðisfjörður in East Iceland. I first visited the town in the autumn of 2020. A few hours after I left, a landslide destroyed a large part of it. Although landslides have become more frequent in our… Read More
BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)
14.08.2026
BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)14.08.2026
– Editors
On Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 July, Drawing Matter presented an exhibition of drawings by BOLLES+WILSON (founded in London in 1980; based in Münster since 1988). The exhibition was the fourth in a series presenting the work of architects and practices that are represented in the Drawing Matter Collection by significant portfolios… Read More
Drawing Motion as Thought
10.08.2026
Drawing Motion as Thought10.08.2026
– MRND
A design (can) begin in the domain of the barely articulate, where drawing operates less as representation than as an instrument for sensing forces that precede form. The early sketches that remain unseen—those made without the burden of explanation—constitute a theoretical ground in which motion is not depicted but pursued.… Read More
Cartography of a Wound
06.08.2026
Cartography of a Wound06.08.2026
How do you draw a diamond mine? How do you depict a wound on the terrain, a spiral of extraction so powerful that it reorganises entire territories? On the sheet, the mine becomes a self-contained world—a floating territory of pits, conveyor belts, processing sheds, and housing blocks—but it also acts… Read More
Three Drawings
24.07.2026
Three Drawings24.07.2026
This first drawing is not ours. It is a clumsy sketch that clients brought to our first meeting. Although not particularly legible, let alone well-proportionated, it carried the noble ambition of speaking about many things at once: it addressed everything, everywhere, all at once. Close inspection revealed three floor plans,… Read More
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process
23.07.2026
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 23.07.2026
– Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle
The following conversation between Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle, publishing director at RIBA, was conducted on 30 December 2021 and has been adapted from a text, originally presented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (Routledge, 2023). It traces the development of Cantley’s experimental drawing practice through Form:uLA—a body of work sustained since… Read More
Yes, And
20.07.2026
A Suite for the Absent Addressee
13.07.2026
A Suite for the Absent Addressee13.07.2026
Prelude Construction has ceased abruptly. The inertia of instruction persists. When drawing is deprived of an addressee, the drift between the prescriptive and the descriptive intensifies. Act I: Villa Consider Villa Pisani Placco by Andrea Palladio, built for Francesco Pisani between 1552 and 1555 in Montagnana. Three elements are of interest:… Read More
Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper
10.07.2026
Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper10.07.2026
My drawings are done on an unusual medium: newspapers. Around 2016, I began to draw on news–paper to try to counteract that inescapable status of newspapers themselves: conveying daily words that are often forgotten the next day, a condition reflected in an idiom of the English language—yesterday’s paper—used to refer… Read More
OPEN-GROUND
10.07.2026
OPEN-GROUND 10.07.2026
– Daniel Jacobs and Brittany Utting
Architecture often treats the surface of the Earth as a liminal plane to break and excavate, cut and fill, and ultimately smooth into a neutral line. Even one of architecture’s most geological of drawing types, the worm’s-eye, typically eradicates any vestiges of earthly matters, reducing the underworld to an empty… Read More
DMJ – SMS to Eternity
03.07.2026
DMJ – SMS to Eternity03.07.2026
Marlon and Elvis lived on opposite sides of Cutlers Wood.They were friends.They were immortal.One day Marlon sent Elvis an SMS: Marlon – Hey Elvis, cool cat, why don’t we see each other more often,We could talk about that geek Warhol who put us here! Elvis – Sure, but I am scared to… Read More
An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati
02.07.2026
An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati02.07.2026
‘In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection’ —Andrei Tarkovsky Italian culture has always produced artists who were attardé, either… Read More
Unknown Hands
29.06.2026
Unknown Hands29.06.2026
The visual material presented here comes from an early phase of House of Fire, an installation created by Studio Paradigma Ariadné for the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennale—long before the exhibition reached its final form. These images were never intended for display. They were test pieces, fragments, unsuccessful experiments, photocopies of photocopies:… Read More
Mapping Water
26.06.2026
Mapping Water26.06.2026
Some years ago, I travelled to Egypt and visited the Suez Canal—the international water passage that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. While standing on a small pier in Ismailia, I watched the huge cargo ships passing; the canal seemed more like a water highway. At the same time,… Read More
Unseen Bodies
19.06.2026
Unseen Bodies19.06.2026
This drawing explores how the human body has been depicted, understood, and imagined in Danish architectural and design education over the past 270 years. It represents a study of more than two hundred public and private archival materials sourced from various contemporary educational institutions, libraries, and archives across Denmark.[1] The… Read More
DMJ – Show
12.06.2026
DMJ – Show12.06.2026
Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? James Joyce, Ulysses 17.2328-32 [1] Night-time on Eccles Street. Someone is half-dreaming of a mythical bird—a roc—in the Arabian… Read More
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing
02.09.2026
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing02.09.2026
– Denise Scott Brown and Ariel Koltun-Fromm
The following interview is excerpted from a longer conversation between Ariel Koltun-Fromm and Denise Scott Brown which took place in April 2024 at her home in Philadelphia. It is part of a larger research project by Ariel investigating drawing as a means of interrogating existing places. * Ariel Koltun-Fromm (AKF):… Read More
presentation survey teaching urban form