Category: on their own work
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19.04.2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19.04.2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’
24.03.2022
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’24.03.2022
The provocation for this essay is Drawing Matter’s own: ‘we take the word “drawing” to be as much a verb as a noun…’ Drawing describes an act and a thing: both a process and the outcome of that process. There aren’t many English words like it, and many of them… Read More
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City
21.03.2022
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City21.03.2022
– Paul Harrison and John Wood
We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings
31.01.2022
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings31.01.2022
As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici
19.01.2022
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici19.01.2022
– Pier Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Gallanti and Maria S. Giudici
This is the nineteenth 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, he talks to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici. Pan Scroll Zoom: Teaching… Read More
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams
12.01.2022
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams12.01.2022
In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems. Fully opaque on its east and west… Read More
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould
11.01.2022
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould11.01.2022
The cover of early editions of John Summerson’s book The Classical Language of Architecture features a curious drawing of a Doric entablature. To all intents and purposes the profile of the entablature is correct, but it has been extruded through the method of oblique projection. It is as if we… Read More
Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project
08.12.2021
Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project08.12.2021
This drawing of the roof level of a fire station, designed as a student work in 1986, was for the ‘Analoge Architektur’ exhibition at the Architektur Forum Zurich. [1] While the drawing is the work of an individual, it was inconceivable without the competitive and collegial development of a drawing… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks
22.11.2021
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks22.11.2021
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza
These films were made over four hours on the afternoon of Sunday 25 March 2018 in Álvaro Siza’s studio in Rua do Aleixo outside Porto. I had flown to Portugal that morning with the seven sketchbooks which we were to look through with Manuel Montenegro. Manuel and I had conceived… Read More
Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani
27.10.2021
Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani27.10.2021
The site chosen by Juan S., an Argentinian with a penchant for Italy, was almost alarmingly steep and sheer above the sea. Even the path leading to it was perilous, and trodden with bated breath. During our long conversations about where the house would be built, we were not so… Read More
The Metropolitan Opera House, NYC: Invisible guests
15.10.2021
The Metropolitan Opera House, NYC: Invisible guests15.10.2021
The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.– Czesław Miłosz, from Ars Poetica? My father, Tad Leski, was an architect and designer for Wallace… Read More
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material
23.09.2021
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material23.09.2021
This is a narrative of listening: listening to materials, processes, place and self. When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment – you perceive, touch, and smell its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently, you register the space that surrounds you. During the initial… Read More
Clancy Moore Architects: Atcost
20.09.2021
Clancy Moore Architects: Atcost20.09.2021
– Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore
The Atcost project makes space for storage, education and performance, enabling a diverse range of activities to enhance the growing programme of Drawing Matter: summer schools, events, and away days for universities and practices. After noticing that the vast majority of these activities take place in summer, we proposed an… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock
01.09.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock01.09.2021
– Job Floris and Fabrizio Gallanti
This is the seventeenth 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. Here, Fabrizio interviews Job Floris, co-founder of Mondanock, about their teaching studios at the EFPL and Harvard… Read More
Cosmos Street Revisited
31.08.2021
Cosmos Street Revisited31.08.2021
This response relates to a text by Oscar Binder and Nicholas Podlanha published by Drawing Matter in July 2021, which described and reconstructed (badly) a lost project by the deceased architect James Clark. In fact I am James Clark (decidedly not dead) and the project parodied in this less than… Read More
Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia
18.08.2021
Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia18.08.2021
– Biba Dow
This painting was made in the early evening in the main square of the medieval town of Gubbio, in central Italy (Perugia). Reached by climbing up narrow winding streets, the Piazza Grande opens out as a belvedere to the southwest, looking across rooftops to the plain below the Apennine foothills.… Read More
Craving Primal Architecture
17.08.2021
Craving Primal Architecture17.08.2021
‘Architecture does not only respond to the functional and conscious intellectual and social needs of today’s city dweller; it must also remember the primordial hunter and farmer concealed in the body. Our sensations of comfort, protection and home are rooted in the primordial experiences of countless generations.’ [1] – Juhani Pallasmaa… Read More
Hélène Binet: The Outsider
19.05.2022
Hélène Binet: The Outsider19.05.2022
– Hélène Binet
a new way of looking at the world Working in my kitchen in the mornings of the 2020 spring.All is silent. Am I silent or is the whole world?In the darkness, you hear better, said Aristotle.In silence and in a closed environment, can you see better? Suddenly the walls of… Read More
domestic interior