Category: project & building histories
Building the Gowan Shed
30 July 2021
Building the Gowan Shed30 July 2021
Through the week of July 12–17, thirteen young architects camped at Shatwell Farm in order to realise a shed from an enigmatic early drawing by James Gowan. The workshop was initiated and led by Maria-Chiara Piccinelli of PiM.studio and Corinna Dean of ARCA. This film portrays the (re)design and construction… Read More
Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House
28 July 2021
Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House28 July 2021
By Neil Jackson
The editors were thrilled to receive this response from Neil Jackson to our publication of drawings and literature relating to Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight house. We are always interested in receiving comments and feedback from our readers: editors@drawingmatter.org. In taking the plan of the Stirling & Gowan’s Isle… Read More
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!
14 July 2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!14 July 2021
By James Gowan
In this pendant piece to Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction, follow James Gowan, once again, as the photographer of his own architecture. The text below is transcribed from an annotated typescript titled ‘Aspects of Humanism’, July 1989, archived at Drawing Matter. The text was published in Architecture Today as ‘Anatomy… Read More
36 Elevations
12 July 2021
36 Elevations12 July 2021
I began this series of drawings with something else in mind. The first picture was to be drawn freehand, but I took a wrong turn straight away by setting up a structure using a set-square around which the composition would be based. I realised that the structure was already a… Read More
Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction
8 July 2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction8 July 2021
By James Gowan
This is the first of three posts publishing material found in the James Gowan archive, now part of the Drawing Matter Collection. The second post will be a companion to this one, and reproduces photographs of the completed Engineering Building; the third assembles archival material relating to the Isle of… Read More
Shatwell Farm: A Step Up
6 July 2021
Shatwell Farm: A Step Up6 July 2021
By John Glew
Imagined as something in between a small building or piece of furniture and a block for mounting a horse, these steps are a shortcut to an out-of-sight sauna that sits above a slope amongst the trees. They are directly visible when leaving the dairy house, sitting to one side of… Read More
Disinformation: Closed Circuit
30 June 2021
Disinformation: Closed Circuit30 June 2021
By Joe Banks
If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures. They become richer, even, than architecture, which Le Corbusier rightly says can best be felt at night. – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964. ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space,… Read More
The Cottage at Bromley
28 June 2021
The Cottage at Bromley28 June 2021
By Tim Anstey and Mari Lending
Text, drawings and models by Pernille Ahlgren. Enjoyable finds in archives often emerge between the lines. Inside the RIBA drawings collection, which is organised to form a narrative celebrating architects and their works, we found a little gem of modern cultural history, consisting of three architectural plans and four letters… Read More
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential
28 June 2021
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential28 June 2021
By Louis Mayes
The sketch has a tectonic quality that remains scaleless, and the crafted nature of the fabric is conveyed through the inconstancy of the pencil lines. The image is a tangible summary of Beigel’s intuitive response to the Pojagi. If we look at the building today, we will see a secondary… Read More
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time
23 June 2021
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time23 June 2021
By Peter Wilson
The absolute precision and technical specificity of Diderot’s encyclopaedia plates, particularly those devoted to Horlogerie, mark a critical moment in the transition from speculative to operative science, from the pre-industrial to a modernist ontology of technical instrumentalisation. Here on these pages, artisan craft is ransomed to the immanent logic of… Read More
26 Kingly Street Co-Op
21 June 2021
26 Kingly Street Co-Op21 June 2021
By Editors
Throughout the 1960s, the Artists’ Own Gallery at 26 Kingly Street in Soho held exhibitions, events and gigs. It was run by a group of artists, including Keith Alban and his wife, Hazel, who exhibited her work there. Malcolm McLaren presented the first public showing of his work at the Gallery… Read More
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House
21 July 2021
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House21 July 2021
By James Gowan, J. M. Richards, Laurent Stalder, James Stirling and Ellis Woodman
This first impetus for this article was provided by Laurent Stalder’s discussion of the sectional perspective drawing for the Isle of Wight house, reproduced here, which lead us to J. M. Richards’ seminal essay, and then onward through the literature. In addition, we asked the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Canadian… Read More
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