Category: project & building histories
Balzac architecte (1856)
09.04.2021
Balzac architecte (1856)09.04.2021
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound
08.04.2021
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound08.04.2021
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she… Read More
Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden
30.03.2021
Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden30.03.2021
The city council of the seaside town Oostende organised a competition for its new casino-kursaal in 1945, and a design by Antwerp architect Léon Stynen was chosen as the winner the following year. Stynen was a prominent name by that time, having previously designed casinos for Knokke, Chaudfontaine, and Blankenberge.… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26.03.2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26.03.2021
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre
22.03.2021
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre22.03.2021
‘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
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16.03.2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16.03.2021
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
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11.03.2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11.03.2021
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
04.03.2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique04.03.2021
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
26.02.2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26.02.2021
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
24.02.2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24.02.2021
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
17.02.2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17.02.2021
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
16.02.2021
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review16.02.2021
– 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
11.02.2021
Charlotte Skene Catling: The Dairy House11.02.2021
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
09.02.2021
Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy09.02.2021
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
05.02.2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery05.02.2021
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
02.02.2021
Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space02.02.2021
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
29.01.2021
Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin29.01.2021
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
25.01.2021
Two Early Paintings with OMA25.01.2021
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
19.01.2021
Zahalternative Histories: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid19.01.2021
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
18.01.2021
Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing18.01.2021
‘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
18.01.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein18.01.2021
– 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
13.01.2021
The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic13.01.2021
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
13.01.2021
Thomas Chippendale and Ornament13.01.2021
‘[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 Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple
12.04.2021
The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple12.04.2021
– Frank Lyons
The Architecture of Nothingness: Drawing the Drawings As architects we have learned to read drawings almost instantly. At a glance we see what the spaces feel like, what it will be like to move around the building and perhaps even get a sense of the appropriateness of the structure. This ‘presentational’ way… Read More
publication concept & diagram religion