Category: project & building histories
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre
22 March 2021
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre22 March 2021
‘I think I understand, at least in principle.’ [1] Jacques Derrida tries to keep track of Peter Eisenman’s elaborate explanation. It is the 21st of April 1986, and in New Haven, Connecticut, philosopher and architect conduct the fifth of six meetings for their design of a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11 March 2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique
4 March 2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique4 March 2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More
Architecture’s Mirror Stage
26 February 2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26 February 2021
Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More
Re-presenting the Rococo
24 February 2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24 February 2021
In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17 February 2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17 February 2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review
16 February 2021
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review16 February 2021
– Editors
Niall Hobhouse writes about The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones. To purchase the book, click here. Green Park, a pair of anecdotes: 1. Queen Caroline – ‘What would it cost, Sir Robert, to close the Park to the public?’ Walpole – ‘May it please your Majesty, but Three Crowns –… Read More
Charlotte Skene Catling: The Dairy House
11 February 2021
Charlotte Skene Catling: The Dairy House11 February 2021
This project involved the enlargement of a nineteenth-century masonry dairy house built by the owner’s great grandfather for the estate’s cheesemaker. The addition fills a narrow space dug into the hill behind the existing house providing additional bedrooms, bathrooms, and more generous circulation spaces. The building sits in an 850-acre… Read More
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy
9 February 2021
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy9 February 2021
John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery
5 February 2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery5 February 2021
A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space
2 February 2021
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space2 February 2021
Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More
Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin
29 January 2021
Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin29 January 2021
The following conversation between the editors of Accattone and Quentin Nicolaï was first published in Accattone 6 (2019). It documents research carried out by Quentin Nicolaï in Abomey, Benin, between January 2014 and June 2018. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the magazine’s editors for allowing us reproduce… Read More
Two Early Paintings with OMA
25 January 2021
Two Early Paintings with OMA25 January 2021
Here, Zoe Zenghelis, painter and founding member of OMA, recalls the making of two paintings now in the Drawing Matter collection. The first, pictured below, is an aerial view of the unbuilt Hotel Therma, and the second is a version of OMA’s entry to the Parc de la Villette competition.… Read More
Zahalternative Histories: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid
19 January 2021
Zahalternative Histories: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid19 January 2021
From a sheet of sketches by Zaha Hadid to rock formations at Ines Meáin and St Brigid’s Well, in this short film John Tuomey explains the thinking behind O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Alternative Histories model. This commentary is the first in a series organised by the Irish Architectural Archive. The series,… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing
18 January 2021
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing18 January 2021
‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein
18 January 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein18 January 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti and Emily Wettstein
This is the sixth 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 Fabrizio interviews Emily Wettstein, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University GSD. The… Read More
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic
13 January 2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13 January 2021
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More
Thomas Chippendale and Ornament
13 January 2021
Thomas Chippendale and Ornament13 January 2021
‘[Ornament] omitted at pleasure,’ wrote Thomas Chippendale in a guide to his revolutionary The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director, the first furniture pattern book of its kind. Although initially considered an advertising tool, it quickly became an invaluable manual for craftsmen, with its clear dimensions and rigorously proportioned pieces open… Read More
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation
8 January 2021
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation8 January 2021
Techniques of architectural drawing have been developed according to the physics of light and our perception of its effects. From the origins of two-dimensional representation – often mythologized in the act of tracing a projected silhouette on a flat surface – to practices of atmospheric simulation in rendering, recognized patterns of light have become essential in the communication of architecture’s spatial… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Architectural Apparitions
7 January 2021
Writing Prize 2020: Architectural Apparitions7 January 2021
Some dreams are never meant to see the light of day. Like a wild design that continually finds itself at the bottom of the roster, patiently waiting its turn to be a part of the city’s skyline, it either promises to burn a hole in the pocket of the investor,… Read More
Shower at Shatwell Farm
21 December 2020
Shower at Shatwell Farm21 December 2020
Being a designer and adherent of adhocism – speed, economy, improvisation and learning-as-you-go – the materials I use have a strong influence on the outcome of my work. This completely dovetailed with Niall’s brief: to design and build an outdoor toilet and shower for occasional scholars occupying the library at… Read More
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints
21 December 2020
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints21 December 2020
They began to bloom on websites a couple of years or so ago – stretching out on social media, unfurling in the arts sections. Pale alien shapes suspended in deep blue: something like lightning flattened in a flower press; a sleeping creature emerging from a cloud of coral; a spectral… Read More
Soane’s Temple Stye
16 December 2020
Soane’s Temple Stye16 December 2020
A temple for pigs? for swine? for hogs? Not a temple to worship them in, nor a temple for them to be sacrificed in. A temple for them to live in. These are not the pigs which invented their own form of latin, or those powerful Orwellian pigs, but normal… Read More
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16 March 2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16 March 2021
– George Dodds
The following text is an excerpt from George Dodds’ book Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005), an analysis of the historiography and mythography of Mies’s building and its afterlives. The author reminded the Drawing Matter editors of the text, in response to our publication in June 2020 of an… Read More
exhibition