Category: project & building histories

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Adrian Dannatt

This is the second 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, and the first text, here. The other sign on the street—blue baked enamel as ur-signifier… Read More

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Team SHICHAI拾柴

This is the first of a series of posts pairing films made by team SHICHAI拾柴 with drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. The films, of houses designed by Alberto Ponis on Sardinia, were made for the exhibition ‘Drawing Landscape: Alberto Ponis,’ exhibited at Tongji University, Shanghai, 10 April—20 May 2023.… Read More

Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream

Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream

António Choupina and Álvaro Siza

In this short video, António Choupina and Álvaro Siza discuss a sketch for an imaginary skyscraper from Caderno 32 (1979), now in the Drawing Matter Collection. Siza describes his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High Illinois’ or ‘Sky City’ tower (1957), and his work for Rogério de Azevedo on the… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Gap and Sign

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Gap and Sign

Adrian Dannatt

When my parents bought the house in 1955—for £1,000—one of the first things Trevor did was design this distinctive gap in the wall of the front garden, a modest modernist castle crenelation. This was deliberately aligned with the edge of the house, on a line with the front steps, so… Read More

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

Peter Celsing

Peter Celsing won the competition to design the Härlanda Church, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1952, and the church was completed seven years later in 1959. The design of the project is a fragmented list of reflections by the architect in the account reproduced below—which was first drafted on receipts from the… Read More

Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’

Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’

Iain Boyd Whyte

This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. In January 1917, the architect Bruno… Read More

DMJ – From Hearths to Volcanoes: the Armenian glkhatun

DMJ – From Hearths to Volcanoes: the Armenian glkhatun

Guillaume Othenin-Girard

This text is the last peer-reviewed essay published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023) Print copies of the Journal and subscriptions for the first three issues are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. ‘Often a traveller… Read More

Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 1985

Accademia Bridge Proposals: Venice Biennale 1985

Editors

This project scrapbook was prompted by Drawing Matter’s recent acquisition of drawings by Peter Wilson and Luc Deleu, made in response to Aldo Rossi’s ‘Progetto Venezia’ brief for the 1985 Venice Biennale, which invited proposals for a new Accademia Bridge to replace the wooden one constructed in the 1930s. Wilson… Read More

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Adrian Hawker

In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More

T.O.P. Office and the Accademia Bridge

T.O.P. Office and the Accademia Bridge

Luc Deleu

In a way, this project was architecturally ‘ready-made’. Our proposal for the Accademia Bridge can best be seen as an example of recycling and reuse. Formally, it sublimates what is available from a limitation of resources and materials. In the concept lies a wink to the (still naive in my… Read More

MJ Long’s Doll House

MJ Long’s Doll House

Elena Palacios Carral

In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Nicholas Olsberg

This project scrapbook traces the publication and exhibition history of Richard Neutra’s experimental Corona Avenue School, built in 1935 after the Los Angeles earthquake of 1933. The material for this scrapbook has been compiled by Nicholas Olsberg; his earlier text on the school for Drawing Matter can be read here.

Construct

Construct

Richard Hall

In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More

Ghost Parking Lot

Ghost Parking Lot

James Wines

SITE, an architecture and environmental art group, was founded in 1970 for the purpose of exploring new ways to bring a heightened level of communication and psychological content to buildings, interiors, and public spaces. Originally organised to research, assemble, and publish international documentation on other artists and architects of similar… Read More

DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History

DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History

Nicholas Boyarsky

This paper explores how asphalt became a medium for architects and artists from the late 1950s to the 1970s to raise and articulate questions about memory, oblivion, communication and the environment. It questions to what extent T.J. Demos’ recent assertion that experimental visual culture is embedded ‘within social engagements and… Read More

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the final of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha

Ivo Poças Martins

In the photograph on the left from 1939, found in the municipal digital archive, Porto’s civic centre is still under construction. The image captures half-paved new roads, with curious people milling around the freshly built City Hall. Viewing this photograph recalls the collages of Fernando Barroso and Mário Ramos, where… Read More

Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)

Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)

Editors

Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More

W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work

W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work

Hugh Strange

This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More

Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?

Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?

Marianna Charitonidou

Le Corbusier placed particular emphasis on the notion of freedom. In Où en est l’architecture?, he declares: ‘I accept a poem only if it is made of “words in freedom”’. [1] In the same text, Le Corbusier describes his conception of art as ‘individual manifestation of freedom’. [2] In Sur… Read More

Geography of Hope: John Lautner

Geography of Hope: John Lautner

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the second of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Suspension and Poise: Lautner at Mountainside The first photograph of John Lautner that we know, shows him as a boy of about fourteen, standing… Read More

Historic England Image Archive

Historic England Image Archive

Arthur Prior-Palmer

For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More

DMJ – Dialogues between Architecture And Granite in Punta Sardegna

DMJ – Dialogues between Architecture And Granite in Punta Sardegna

Alberto Ponis

The stones are also premonitions, and the trails chart a course through nature that is both sign and path, direction and culture. The human journey and the mystery of the eternal, chance and intervention. Thus, the pre-existing stones are added and mingle with those put in later, and vice versa,… Read More