Category: project & building histories
On the Street
14 June 2024
On the Street14 June 2024
The Drawing Matter editors have been enjoying Eddie Heathcote’s On the Street: In-Between Architecture and wanted to share the following short extracts. Draining Against the wall under the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome is a strange object, looking a little like a pancake with… Read More
Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto
10 June 2024
Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto10 June 2024
The design of Casa a Diacceto responds to the principle of ‘discontinuity’ theorised by Lapo Binazzi at the beginning of the 1970s: architecture can only be thought of and realised in fragments and pieces, there is no longer a coherent unity. The pieces are never invented, but are taken from… Read More
OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds
31 May 2024
OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds31 May 2024
This is the second post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein
29 May 2024
Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein29 May 2024
This text by Matt Page will be included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin again. Fail Better: Preliminary drawings in architecture (and art). The exhibition opens on the 31st May 2024 at the Kunstmuseum Olten, and includes nearly 100 drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. More information about the exhibition… Read More
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra
20 May 2024
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra20 May 2024
The Alhambra architectural models reflect the circumstances in which they were created, during the last years of the Romantic movement, when artists and patrons were fascinated by the diffuse idea of the ‘Orient’, somewhat embodied by the Alhambra. This part-myth, part-real palace was the ultimate destination for Romantic travellers and… Read More
O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor
17 May 2024
O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor17 May 2024
– Diogo Lopes and Fanny Noël
This drawing emerged within the framework of a summer school in Berlin, organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers for his Cornell students in 1977. The project was developed by the German architect together with his assistants, Peter Riemann, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska and it offers a vision for… Read More
Banham in Buffalo
13 May 2024
Banham in Buffalo13 May 2024
[Our] main emphasis in this course has been on using primary sources in studying architectural history. By this I mean that we have been using the building itself as the first source of information about the history of the building.[1] Reyner Banham moved to America in 1976 to take up… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19 April 2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19 April 2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings
12 April 2024
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings12 April 2024
On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door
3 April 2024
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door3 April 2024
This is the sixth part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, here. Entering the house the first thing one sees is the entrance door to my… Read More
Masterplanning the University of London
27 March 2024
Masterplanning the University of London27 March 2024
Legend has it that Charles Holden promised the University of London a building that would last five hundred years. While there is no hard evidence for Holden’s claim, his Senate House (1932–37) looks as permanent as anything built in modern Britain. A 19-storey tower faced with granite and Portland stone,… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25 March 2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25 March 2024
Andrea Branzi died on 9 October 2023 aged 84. The impact of one of his seminal works, No-Stop City, has been felt far and wide within architectural discourse. Since its production between 1967 and 1972, the drawings and collages of No-Stop City have haunted the camps within architectural academia that… Read More
Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum
22 March 2024
Helmut Jacoby: The Amon Carter Museum22 March 2024
You can stand on the balcony of Philip Johnson’s Amon Carter Museum today and see the same view of Fort Worth that Helmut Jacoby drew up in 1960. Not much has changed. Apart from the fanciful New-Mexican art in the foreground (his invention), the same hot Texan sun, the same… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
18 March 2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands18 March 2024
The following text is the fifth and final in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have… Read More
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things
4 March 2024
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things4 March 2024
‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.
29 February 2024
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.29 February 2024
– Felicia Liang and William Wikström
Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More
Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault
28 February 2024
Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault28 February 2024
If you really want to hear about where to find the mountain vaults of Swiss banks, and what they look like, the first thing you should probably know is that the archives vigilantly kept by almost all banks in Switzerland are not publicly accessible—and even when they are, the last thing… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
12 February 2024
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands12 February 2024
The following text is the fourth in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury
2 February 2024
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury2 February 2024
– Bill Sherman and Richard Temple
Quoted from the exhibition text of Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus, curated by Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute and Richard Temple, Archivist of the University of London. The exhibition continues until 17 March in the Chancellor’s Hall Lobby, First Floor, Senate House. More information here.… Read More
Simon Fraser University
1 February 2024
Simon Fraser University1 February 2024
This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31 January 2024
Careful Crudeness31 January 2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29 January 2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29 January 2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action
9 May 2024
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action9 May 2024
– Mikael Bergquist
Hermann Czech: Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action) is on show at Fanz-Josef-Kai 3, Vienna, from 16 March – 9 June, 2024. On 15 March 2024, an exhibition on the Austrian architect Hermann Czech’s work opened in Vienna at the exhibition space Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 (fJk3). It is the first retrospective… Read More
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