Category: on their own work

Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption

Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption

Dara Birnbaum

My first experience with video art happened by chance. After obtaining an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I joined Lawrence Halprin & Associates, an architectural firm in San Francisco that specialised in the planning of urban spaces and then conveying, through varying means of visual communication, such ideas… Read More

Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974

Informal Housing in Fars (Iran) and Kuwait, 1974

Eric Parry

This is another world – Yazd, a desert town really. It is troglodytic – a response to a hot, dry climate, so it is cut into the ground using mud brick, the wind catchers and domes create the silhouettes. So these pages are about the visit to Yazd – getting… 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

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

Boompjes I

Boompjes I

Stefano de Martino

In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam asked OMA to study its high-rise building and to illustrate their findings in a planning proposal. The site, selected in consultation with the Rotterdam Planning Department, was situated on Maasboulevard, near the Maasbridge – an angle between the river and the lower city grid, a ‘hinge’… Read More

Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island

Zoe Zenghelis

The Roosevelt Island competition was sponsored by New York State Urban Development Corporation for the urbanisation of an island in the East River of Manhattan. The city grid served as a formal generator for the building types, adapted with controlling geometry to the proportions of the island’s topography. There are… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Zaha Hadid: Azabu-Juban

Michael Wolfson

Zaha Hadid’s sketches during mid-1980s for projects often unknown and unbuilt mark a transitional period in her drawing and thinking, from the early work inspired by the programme briefs and axonometric drawing style of OMA. Often she sketches in plan, her line moving right to left, discernable through an initial… Read More

Eric Parry: Iran, 1974

Eric Parry: Iran, 1974

Eric Parry

If I now open the page – this sketchbook is different to rest because at that time, one had time. There was no planning to any of these. No A to Z or intention of a grand plan. For the months involved there is not much evidence, only a hint… Read More

Eric Parry: India, 1975

Eric Parry: India, 1975

Eric Parry

This sketchbook results from a journey through west and northwest India focussed on the study of low-cost settlements in Bombay and Ahmedabad. It followed a seven-month period of research around nomadic environments in Iran and Kuwait. This mind- and eye-opening time was spent with colleague Andrew Thorne. Going back to… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in Conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in Conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More

TEd’A Arquitectes

TEd’A Arquitectes

Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez

‘…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of… Read More

Madelon Vriesendorp

Madelon Vriesendorp

Niall Hobhouse and Madelon Vriesdendorp

Excerpted from Madelon Vreisendop in conversation with Niall Hobhouse, RIBA, 2 July 2018

Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive

Hugh Strange Architects: Drawing Matter Archive

We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More

Siza and the Limits of Representation

Siza and the Limits of Representation

Niall Hobhouse

Over the years in which the collection of Drawing Matter has been formed we have come to understand that the most productive discussion of architecture is actually about the precise relationship between the drawing and ‘its’ building. One good rule is that an architect with a powerful idea is always… Read More

Netherfield Scroll Two

Netherfield Scroll Two

Michael Gold

What follows here forms the second part of a two-part conversation. It has been extracted from the original email exchange between Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones in relation to the acquisition of the Netherfield Scroll, published in part one. The Netherfield Scroll – which measures 20… Read More

Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll

Grunt Group: Unrolling the Netherfield Scroll

On 7 April 2018, former members of the Grunt Group – Chris Cross, Jeremy Dixon, Michael Gold and Edward Jones – presented their Netherfield Scroll to Drawing Matter. The 20-foot-long drawing was created c. 1971 for a low-density, social housing estate in Milton Keynes. The following video is a brief… Read More

Drawing Out Gehry

Drawing Out Gehry

Riet Eeckhout

There is something about the immediacy of drawing at a large size, standing in front of a drawing board that brings the quality and urgency of instant involvement with a subject in view.  Drawing at a size in relation to your body allows for the drawing not to become object, treasured in hand,… Read More

Yacht Club Path

Yacht Club Path

Alberto Ponis

I The drawings have different stories. They don’t have a linear story, a beginning date and then a finished date at the end. Sometimes they are drawn in the beginning before the project is built and then continue during the construction of the project and sometimes too – actually, quite often… Read More

Onto an Epicycle of Cones

Onto an Epicycle of Cones

Mark Ericson

This drawing is part of a series that interrogates the orthographic drawing techniques of Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) set out in his posthumous treatise, Architettura civile, (1737). While some of the drawings from the series deal with the direct documentation of his orthographic drawings, this particular drawing translates his written and drawn instructions… Read More

Foster + Partners: Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus

Foster + Partners: Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus

Norman Foster

Following on from Farshid Moussavi’s curatorial decision to create a display of construction drawings that showcase the ‘full complexity of the different systems and parts of buildings’, I chose this compelling BIM drawing from the Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus project, which suitably illustrates our integrated design approach. Throughout the… Read More

Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

Toyo Ito

The catenoidal structures of the National Taichung Theatre unfold their space both vertically and laterally, forming the continuous interior space-tubes for the theatrical venue — named ‘Sound Caves’. Our design theme for this building was, from the planning to construction period, to conceive of the structural and mechanical arrangement along… Read More