Category: on their own work
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation
08.05.2024
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation08.05.2024
Architecture is a promiscuous practice that touches and learns from many other disciplines. Architects have associated their studies with other specialisations in the sciences, arts and humanities and many of the aspects of architectural education draw upon and defer to those realms. To make architecture one needs to gather ideas… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture
29.04.2024
Sugimoto and Architecture29.04.2024
The early twentieth century saw a multifaceted blossoming of the avant-garde in Europe, with Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl… These movements also had an influence on architecture. Until the nineteenth century, people’s way of living was centred around religion. Much architectural decoration was developed in order to express the magnificence… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff
29.04.2024
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff29.04.2024
– David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff
This interview is excerpted from the catalogue of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which was on show at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October 2023 – 07 January 2024, and is touring to UCCA Beijing and MCA Australia. Copies of the catalogue can be purchased here. Ralph Rugoff: Hiroshi Sugimoto has… Read More
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?
26.04.2024
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?26.04.2024
James Stirling’s presentation drawing from 1957 to a faculty of engineers might seem strangely familiar to contemporary architects. A section of a box, showing the structure, services, and how people might dwell inside—it almost anticipates the prefabricated modular construction architects are now being asked to design. Only a few years… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19.04.2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19.04.2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens
15.02.2024
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens15.02.2024
In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
12.02.2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands12.02.2024
The following text is the fourth in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More
Simon Fraser University
01.02.2024
Simon Fraser University01.02.2024
This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29.01.2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29.01.2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
15.01.2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands15.01.2024
The following text is the third in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed by Kieran from a… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
04.12.2023
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands04.12.2023
The following text is the second in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More
On Drawing
30.11.2023
On Drawing30.11.2023
A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
03.11.2023
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands03.11.2023
The following text is the first in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop
01.11.2023
Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop01.11.2023
– Alberto Johnsson, Arthur Masure, Daniel Nitsche, Toby Pullen and Alexander Turner
During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of… Read More
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once
20.10.2023
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once20.10.2023
In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More
Remembering Architecture
18.10.2023
Remembering Architecture18.10.2023
This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More
Elbe and Marte
13.09.2023
Elbe and Marte13.09.2023
– Karen Lohrmann and Stefano de Martino
Elbe and Marte is the spatial and ecological adjustment of a 16th-century rural complex and experimental landscape in the Gulf of Naples. Set deep into the coastal hillside, it encompasses a massive work of geo-engineering with rock and stone walls across 30 vertical terraces. It is a survey of time… Read More
Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’
01.09.2023
Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’01.09.2023
The following text is an excerpt from Denise Scott Brown’s 2018 Soane Medal lecture, written by Thomas Weaver, and developed out of a series of conversations between Denise Scott Brown and Thomas Weaver in July 2018. I have never thought of myself as a photographer, only an architect and urbanist,… Read More
Comins x Shatwell Tea House
25.08.2023
Comins x Shatwell Tea House25.08.2023
– Various
Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More
Capilla Pajaritos
24.08.2023
Capilla Pajaritos24.08.2023
The following text was written by Alberto Cruz as an account of the project for a small chapel outside of Santiago (1952–3; first published in Spanish in 1954). It describes an unfolding process of design, framed around the guiding principles of observation, act, and, form—the key tenets of Cruz’s architectural… Read More
Chloethiel Woodard Smith
16.08.2023
Chloethiel Woodard Smith16.08.2023
In June 2023 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, gave a talk about American modernist architect and urban planner Chloethiel Woodard Smith. Part of the series ‘Rethinking Architectural Legacies’ at the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the talk was titled ‘How to Succeed as a Woman: Chloethiel Woodard… Read More
The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso
17.07.2023
The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso17.07.2023
Alberto Cruz presented the principles of The Palace of Dawn and Dusk (Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso) in the Open City’s Music Room on 19 January 1981[1]. While the initial project comprised four lodges with communal rooms, courtyards, and public baths, ultimately, as Cruz describes, following a ‘poetic revelation’… Read More
A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine
06.07.2023
A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine06.07.2023
Most of us must sometimes receive a message or a drawing that in retrospect we wish we’d retained—but they go astray. In my own case I can recall three: a note from the philosopher Bernard Williams about his friend Thomas Nagel (lost without record) a postcard from Göran Schildt clarifying our… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
18.03.2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands18.03.2024
– Kieran Hawkins
The following text is the fifth and final in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have… Read More
domestic connor street: made by many hands (series)