Category: on their own work

Power & Public Space 4: Jonas Žukauskas – Forest Parts

Power & Public Space 4: Jonas Žukauskas – Forest Parts

Matthew Blunderfield and Jonas Žukauskas

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: When we think about public space, we tend to consider the street, the plaza, the park or the square – urban spaces… Read More

Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue

Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue

Matthew Blunderfield and Manuel Herz

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one… Read More

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Richard Hall

We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More

Power & Public Space 2: Lauren Bon – Bending the River Back to the City

Power & Public Space 2: Lauren Bon – Bending the River Back to the City

Matthew Blunderfield and Lauren Bon

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: The concrete-lined LA River was built on top of a sprawling floodplain, which the land artist Lauren Bon seeks to reveal through… Read More

Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden

Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden

Matthew Blunderfield and Liza Fior

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: The Dalston Eastern Curve garden began as a meanwhile scheme, but over the past decade has embedded itself at the centre of… Read More

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II

Freddie Phillipson

This is part two of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I

Freddie Phillipson

This is part one of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction

Freddie Phillipson

This text introduces The Ulysses Project by architect Freddie Phillipson, his exploration of the relationship between the buildings of Dublin and James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, from 17 June – 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international… Read More

Hélène Binet: The Outsider

Hélène Binet: The Outsider

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

‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

William Burges

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’

Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’

Beth George

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

Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City

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

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

George Saumarez Smith

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

Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici

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

Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams

Daniel Luis Martinez

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

Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould

Charles Holland

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

In Defence of Metaphor

In Defence of Metaphor

Deanna Petherbridge

This text concludes Deanna Petherbridge’s series Drawing as Metaphor. The complete series will appear as a printed publication in the new year, designed by Studio Christopher Victor; the drawings will be on show at the Art Space Gallery (84 St Peter’s Street, London N1 8JS) in an exhibition titled Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing… Read More

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Analoge Architektur: Fire Station Project

Daniel Studer

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

Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks

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

Architectonic Landscapes

Architectonic Landscapes

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the fifth in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she comments on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues. Read the introduction to the series, here.… Read More

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis

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

The Metropolitan Opera House, NYC: Invisible guests

Kyna Leski

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

The Order of Terror

The Order of Terror

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the fourth in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she comments on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues. Read the introduction to the series, here.… Read More