Category: project & building histories

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg

Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887-1865) trained in the fine and decorative arts before undertaking travels and varied apprenticeships to develop his architectural skills, opening a studio and teaching practice in La Chaux in 1912, and moving to Paris in 1917 to work principally as a… Read More

Protected: The Design Legacy of Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich

Protected: The Design Legacy of Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich

Amos Goldreich

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition

Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition

Majed Alghaemdi

Saudi Arabia’s Quest for Modern Identity and the Urban Transformation of Riyadh Beginning in the 1960s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious building programme, resulting in numerous architectural projects recognised internationally for their remarkable scale as well as their innovative architectural and engineering solutions.[1] This extensive initiative gained substantial momentum from… Read More

AnnaRita Zalaffi: The Engineer at the Heart of Alberto Ponis’ Work

AnnaRita Zalaffi: The Engineer at the Heart of Alberto Ponis’ Work

Alex Pillen

In April, Alex Pillen interviewed AnnaRita Zalaffi over the course of a day at her home in Palau, Sardinia. This text, which focuses on AnnaRita’s early life and her creative collaboration with her husband and professional partner Alberto Ponis, is published to coincide with the exhibition ‘The Crystal and the… Read More

Protected: Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência

Protected: Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência

Peter Carl

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Tony Fretton and Ricardo Aboim Inglez

Tony Fretton founded his architectural practice (Tony Fretton Architects) in 1982 in London. He came into international prominence in 1991 after the completion of the second Lisson Gallery building, transforming the street into an urban setting to be absorbed by culture. From his house in London and over two hours,… Read More

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

Editors

In 1970 Pierre Restany and Guido Le Noci, director of the Apollinaire gallery, decided to celebrate, with the help of the municipality of Milan, the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Nouveaux Réalistes group. On 27 November, ten years after Yves Klein published his single-issue newspaper Le Dimanche 27… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Adrian Dannatt

Bringing the outside indoors, merging and blurring nature and culture, extending the garden into the study—such notions, a legacy of a generous North American sense of the landscape, from Fallingwater to the Case Study Houses, may have drifted into cliché but still, there is such glory to the actual open… Read More

River Arno

River Arno

Ivo Poças Martins

In Florence, the flooding of the River Arno on November 4, 1966 was of a magnitude not seen in almost 500 years of history. The city, built on this alluvial plain, was flooded and the river overflowed its banks, filling areas as far away as the Piazza del Duomo with… Read More

The (Im)possible Palimpsest

The (Im)possible Palimpsest

Mattia De Lotto

Preceding the Campo Marzio plan, a plate named Scenographia Campi Martii offers a clue towards an understanding of Piranesi’s work—the terminology is fundamental, the word Scenographia is purposely chosen to make a direct link to the theatrical representation and scenic design, often investigated by Piranesi. The image presented in this… Read More

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. As architectural typologies, abattoirs, boucheries, and slaughterhouses embody the civilising of animal slaughter; serving as concrete expressions of the culture of animal consumption. Over time, the slaughterhouse has evolved in both its structures and perceptions, from a small-scale, craft-based operation rooted in necessity,… Read More

Curtains

Curtains

Petra Blaisse and Sophie Wehtje

Brief email exchanges.  When meeting physically is out of the question, good old-fashioned correspondence still works, even if and for some time now, it is done electronically. This is how many of the editorial pieces on the Drawing Matter website come into being—through a chain of typed messages. It’s a… Read More

Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Reyner Banham

The building is in many ways as extraordinary as its details. At ground-floor level it confronts the visitor with a blank wall of hard-faced red brick, which is occasionally pierced with a rather private-looking doorway, except at the point where the glazed main-entrance lobby splits this defensive podium into two… Read More

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More

Broadcasting Norwegian Time

Broadcasting Norwegian Time

Jørgen J. Tandberg

All drawings were done by Nils Holter Office during the NRK project period 1941-47, each made in pencil on paper with the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Drawings from Nils Holter’s archives/Jan Bauck Arkitektkontor. Photographs courtesy of Jørgen Johan Tandberg. In the summer of 2024, and after several… Read More

Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students

Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students

Mary Mitchell

In 1999, I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University studying Architectural History when I undertook a work placement at the university archives. Here I was asked to help organise an uncatalogued collection received from the Patrick Geddes Centre at the Outlook Tower. Within this collection were 12 portfolios. Portfolio 7… Read More

The Cypress and the Arch

The Cypress and the Arch

Bohdan Kryzhanovsky

The following text first appeared in Bohdan Kryzhanovsky, Architecture After War: A Reader (London: MACK, 2024), 9–24. Architecture in the present is closely related to the past, to culture, and to collective memory. We always build and design in context, and each building grows from the precedents of hundreds of previous… Read More

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Pierre Chabard

Tête-à-tête Charles Vandenhove’s transformation of the Hôtel Torrentius in Liège’s Rue Saint-Pierre between 1977 and 1981 marked a crucial point in the trajectory of both the building and the architect. When, in November 1977, Vandenhove purchased the mansion to set up his architectural practice and city home, the building was… Read More

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More

Drawing on Ideas

Drawing on Ideas

Stan Allen

In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Ralf Bock

In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Erin McKellar

Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman

This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More

Lisson 1 + 2

Lisson 1 + 2

Tony Fretton

LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More