Category: project & building histories
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette
18 November 2024
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette18 November 2024
The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More
On origins and originality
15 November 2024
On origins and originality15 November 2024
The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and interpretation in staging a museum
11 November 2024
Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and interpretation in staging a museum11 November 2024
The following text was first published in OASE #111: Staging the Museum (2022). Drawing Matter would like to thank Tony Fretton and the issue’s editors Aslı Çiçek, Jantje Engels, and Maarten Liefooghe, for allowing us to reproduce the text. Purchase a copy of OASE #111 here. Fuglsang Kunstmuseum is located on the… Read More
In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini
4 November 2024
In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini4 November 2024
– Editors
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. Premiered at this year’s La Biennale di Venezia, was Andres Veiel’s documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director known for Olympia (1936) and Triumph des Willens (1935). Framed through archival material Veil’s Riefenstahl (2024) demonstrates how her work was inextricably linked to… Read More
OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative
31 October 2024
OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative31 October 2024
This is the sixth and final post, in the series 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
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood
14 October 2024
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood14 October 2024
At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3
10 October 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 310 October 2024
This post concludes Nicholas Olsberg’s series on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, the text of which is included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Sounding corridors’: entry and sequence The driveway brings us into a… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2
3 October 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 23 October 2024
This post continues with the second part of Nicholas Olsberg’s text on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Cycles of the human tale’: the library The elevation of the… Read More
OMA: Collaborators—Allies
30 September 2024
OMA: Collaborators—Allies30 September 2024
This is the fifth 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
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1
23 September 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 123 September 2024
William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s
16 September 2024
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s16 September 2024
– Editors and John Summerson
In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office
9 September 2024
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office9 September 2024
Sir John Soane’s drawing offices at Nos 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the fulcrum of his practice between 1794 and his retirement in 1833. His unique surviving ‘upper’ office was restored in 2022–23. In this article, I will trace the history of the office and recount its use… Read More
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect
2 September 2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect2 September 2024
– Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki
It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project
29 August 2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project29 August 2024
This is the fourth 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
Drawings as Cosmovisions
12 August 2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12 August 2024
My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge
9 August 2024
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge9 August 2024
The war to restore to churches ritual and at the same time architectural dignity was waged by one man and one society, the man being a fervent convert to Catholicism, the society calling itself Catholic too, but meaning what is called Anglo-Catholic. They operated independently, but appreciated one another. The… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15 July 2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15 July 2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
Manufacturers Trust Bank
9 July 2024
Manufacturers Trust Bank9 July 2024
When one thinks of Manufacturers Trust Company and New York City architecture, the first image that comes to mind is Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s international style bank building on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street from 1954. By that year, SOM with Gordon Bunshaft as a design partner were the architects… Read More
Sydney’s Infill Facades
5 July 2024
Sydney’s Infill Facades5 July 2024
This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade
28 June 2024
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade28 June 2024
This is the third 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
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter
25 June 2024
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter25 June 2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More
On the Street
14 June 2024
On the Street14 June 2024
The Drawing Matter editors have been enjoying Eddie Heathcote’s On the Street: In-Between Architecture and wanted to share the following short extracts. Draining Against the wall under the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome is a strange object, looking a little like a pancake with… Read More
Streetscapes: Bath
7 October 2024
Streetscapes: Bath7 October 2024
– Ptolemy Dean
The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More
sketch record urban form