Category: project & building histories
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!
14.07.2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!14.07.2021
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
12.07.2021
36 Elevations12.07.2021
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
08.07.2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction08.07.2021
Follow James Gowan, through his own photographs, as he inspects the construction progress of the Leicester Engineering Building. While these photographs may have been taken for immediate use at the time, they now serve as a permanent record of the temporary and internal structures that were later disassembled or concealed.… Read More
Shatwell Farm: A Step Up
06.07.2021
Shatwell Farm: A Step Up06.07.2021
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
30.06.2021
Disinformation: Closed Circuit30.06.2021
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
28.06.2021
The Cottage at Bromley28.06.2021
– Tim Anstey and Mari Lending
Enjoyable finds in archives often emerge between the lines. Inside RIBA Collections, which is organised to form a narrative celebrating architects and their works, we found a gem of modern cultural history, consisting of three architectural plans and four letters (ten pages altogether, eight in transcript, two typed). [1] The… Read More
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential
28.06.2021
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential28.06.2021
Below is a sketch of a traditional South Korean Pojagi (a handcrafted patchwork tapestry) drawn by Florian Beigel. Described as ‘beautifully unsure’, it shows the importance of the sketch in translating between a reference and the key concept of the Pojagi House, designed by Beigel and the Architectural Research Unit… Read More
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time
23.06.2021
From Diderot to Tokyo: Mechanical, Subjective and Digital Time23.06.2021
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
21.06.2021
26 Kingly Street Co-Op21.06.2021
– 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 Albarn and his wife, Hazel, who exhibited her work there. Malcolm McLaren presented the first public showing of his work at the Gallery… Read More
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh
15.06.2021
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh15.06.2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More
Stephen Taylor: Haybarn
14.06.2021
Stephen Taylor: Haybarn14.06.2021
‘What looks like a fairly simple building from a distance becomes more and more sophisticated the closer one looks. The gentle slope to the trabeated front elevation subtly reveals itself, for example, cleverly disguised by the character of the jagged brick columns built out of snapped headers and filled with… Read More
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh
07.06.2021
Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh07.06.2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989
02.06.2021
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 198902.06.2021
In his voyage to Samos in the Summer of 1989 Aldo Rossi gathered a collection of fragments in accordance with a Palladian education. The image repeats itself, following what Johns had written in 1984: ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two:… Read More
Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church
01.06.2021
Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church01.06.2021
Up until the turn of the twentieth century architectural renderings tended to be created for clients early in the design process to give them an idea of how a proposed building would look. At that point however they began to be used more widely for publicity purposes as well, thanks… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre
01.06.2021
Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre01.06.2021
‘Artists such as Poelzig, prevented from building in real life, have been driven to create Expressionist cinema architecture […] But in the long run, pasteboard fantasy creations […] can never be satisfying fodder for the architect; he has an inner urge to conceive and erect buildings in which real people… Read More
BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania
27.05.2021
BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania27.05.2021
Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt
26.05.2021
68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt26.05.2021
Review By preserving the trees on the site within his pavilion in the Giardini, Sverre Fehn offered Venice an insight into a unique Nordic sensitivity towards nature and the environment. He tempered the harsh Mediterranean sun to evoke the horizontal light of the Baltic through a spectacularly innovative technical design… Read More
biq: Revealing Construction
26.05.2021
biq: Revealing Construction26.05.2021
The French Modernist Auguste Perret is famously quoted as saying that ‘Construction is the mother tongue of the architect. The architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in terms of construction’. If this is the case, and given drawings are the primary communication tool for architects, it is perhaps… Read More
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal
24.05.2021
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal24.05.2021
It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City
12.05.2021
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City12.05.2021
Hans Hollein’s city structures look awry to someone familiar with his retail work. In the time that these drawings were made, Hollein completed his UC Berkeley degree, travelled across the USA, and did an exhibition with Walter Pichler in Austria. His most influential visit was to the Native American pueblos.… Read More
14 Wine Street, Bristol
29.04.2021
14 Wine Street, Bristol29.04.2021
Whilst leafing through the Drawing Matter collection, this drawing from 1885, by architect Henry Crisp, caught my eye. The drawing depicts a new shopfront and facade to be grafted on to the existing structure of 14 Wine Street, Bristol. Initially, the design struck me as remarkably contemporary and I came… Read More
Leicester Engineering building: Two Architects (1964)
26.04.2021
Leicester Engineering building: Two Architects (1964)26.04.2021
Filmed in 1964, Ron Parks’ documentary on the newly completed Engineering Department at Leicester catches James Stirling and James Gowan at a moment of professional triumph and personal crisis. Their building was being applauded the world-over – Parks’ film had been commissioned by the American Institute of Architects, to mark its… Read More
Open Wide / Wide Open
22.04.2021
Open Wide / Wide Open22.04.2021
We started with six words: a short-term dwelling for an artist then added: with a child What adaptations have you made to your domestic space since having a child? / What adaptations have you made to your work space since having a child? / How / When / Where do… Read More
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House
21.07.2021
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House21.07.2021
– 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 led 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
domestic DMC plan section