Category: project & building histories
OMA: Collaborators—Allies
30.09.2024
OMA: Collaborators—Allies30.09.2024
This is the fifth 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
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1
23.09.2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 123.09.2024
William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office
09.09.2024
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office09.09.2024
Sir John Soane’s drawing offices at Nos 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the fulcrum of his practice between 1794 and his retirement in 1833. His unique surviving ‘upper’ office was restored in 2022–23. In this article, I will trace the history of the office and recount its use… Read More
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect
02.09.2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect02.09.2024
– Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki
It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project
29.08.2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project29.08.2024
This is the fourth 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
Drawings as Cosmovisions
12.08.2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12.08.2024
My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge
09.08.2024
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge09.08.2024
The war to restore to churches ritual and at the same time architectural dignity was waged by one man and one society, the man being a fervent convert to Catholicism, the society calling itself Catholic too, but meaning what is called Anglo-Catholic. They operated independently, but appreciated one another. The… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15.07.2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15.07.2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
Manufacturers Trust Bank
09.07.2024
Manufacturers Trust Bank09.07.2024
When one thinks of Manufacturers Trust Company and New York City architecture, the first image that comes to mind is Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s international style bank building on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street from 1954. By that year, SOM with Gordon Bunshaft as a design partner were the architects… Read More
Sydney’s Infill Facades
05.07.2024
Sydney’s Infill Facades05.07.2024
This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade
28.06.2024
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade28.06.2024
This is the third 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
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter
25.06.2024
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter25.06.2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More
On the Street
14.06.2024
On the Street14.06.2024
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
10.06.2024
Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto10.06.2024
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
31.05.2024
OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds31.05.2024
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
29.05.2024
Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein29.05.2024
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
20.05.2024
Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra20.05.2024
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
17.05.2024
O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor17.05.2024
– 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
13.05.2024
Banham in Buffalo13.05.2024
[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
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action
09.05.2024
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action09.05.2024
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
OMA: London—Foreplay
19.04.2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19.04.2024
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
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s
16.09.2024
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s16.09.2024
– Editors and John Summerson
In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More
plan projection (axonometric isometric) student work housing urban form DMC