Category: uncategorised

Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality

Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality

Marianna Charitonidou

Alison and Peter Smithson often introduced figures that were protagonists in the news, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, French actor Gérard Philipe, and the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru into their architectural drawings for social housing projects—as in the case of their collages for the… Read More

Shatwell farm open day – 18 June 2022

Shatwell farm open day – 18 June 2022

Drawing Matter is holding its annual Open Day on Saturday 18 June, 11am-7pm. Visitors will be invited to explore the site of Shatwell Farm, which includes completed buildings by Hugh Strange, Stephen Taylor, David Grandorge, and Skene Catling de la Pena architects, a conversion by Clancy Moore Architects, and a variety of… Read More

Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm

Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm

Benjamin Machin

The following is an account of a visit to Drawing Matter in March 2022 made by Benjamin Machin and his students at the Loughborough School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering – Alina Abdulwahid, Nyewuna Amadi, Jemima Dabell, Beckie Downs, Lewis Foster-Jeapes, Will Jones, Will Mennell, Danielle Riley, Joe Tolley,… Read More

An Artist Browsing the Collection

An Artist Browsing the Collection

Sandra Porter

My visits to the archive happened during the summer of 2021 in a gap between lockdowns. Shatwell Farm is a haven of contemporary buildings sitting alongside tumbling and restored farm buildings, an obelisk, pillars, corrugated materials, stone, sleepers, silos, a library, and a gallery. Amongst all this is the Drawing… Read More

Reflections on my Internship

Reflections on my Internship

Jonah Ginsburg

In April 2021, I hesitantly emailed the editors at Drawing Matter to ask if they were currently accepting internship applications. Why would the Drawing Matter team want to burden themselves with an inexperienced and most likely unhelpful American intern? They had no established internship program, Covid-19 cases were on the… Read More

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Roz Barr

Options Studio was an Elective Module at Cornell University led by Roz Barr. The act of making means engaging with an idea that can be made, unmade, and reconsidered before being realised. Model-making has a critical role in formulating and realising an idea. Materiality and form are developed through discussions… Read More

Signature

Signature

André Patrão

It’s just a small loose sheet of paper ripped off a notepad. Along its margins, an elegant round-cornered brown border, once enclosing an anonymous blank space of empty expectancy, now ceremoniously frames a mysteriously attractive, harmonious, yet utterly cryptic mark, struck and left upon its surface: a signature. By whose… Read More

Collection of Sections

Collection of Sections

Allen Keith Yee

The following drawings and commentaries have been excerpted from Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections (Oro Editions, 2020). The publication surveys the use of section drawings in the histories of architecture and other professions, from the 17th century to the present. More information on the book can be found here.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan

Alternative Histories: Hild und K Architekten on James Gowan

“Form follows fender” In James Gowan’s parallel projections we were particularly interested in their spatial qualities, and how the form could develop. Seen as a negative space, it could be a staggered courtyard. James Gowan used a car shape as a reference. By extracting the theme and duplicating the shape… Read More

Alternative Histories: Knapkiewicz & Fickert on Charles Barry

Alternative Histories: Knapkiewicz & Fickert on Charles Barry

Axel Fickert and Kaschka Knapkiewicz

Even though we live in a different culture and the world has changed, our rites and experiences have evolved. The incredible might and strength of these spaces touches us deeply. It is a splendid sequence of spaces that leads to the inner sanctuary of the temple of Amon. A sequence… Read More

Alternative Histories: Professur Lehnerer ETH & Klara Bindl On SUperstudio

Alternative Histories: Professur Lehnerer ETH & Klara Bindl On SUperstudio

Alternative Histories: Raamwerk on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: Raamwerk on Tony Fretton

Alternative Histories: Sam Jacob Studio on Archizoom

Alternative Histories: Sam Jacob Studio on Archizoom

What might the purpose of an alternative history be? How might we collaborate with the past? What passes from one generation to another or from one hand to another? Is the construction of a (new) model of an (old) project a way of producing an alternative past? Or different present?… Read More

Alternative Histories: Veldwerk Architecten on Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont

Alternative Histories: Veldwerk Architecten on Gabriel Pierre Martin Dumont

Paper Mountain Like the models it displays, the paper mountain exhibition scenography finds its origins in a historic drawing from the Drawing Matter archive. Gabriel Dumont’s section of a theatre auditorium and balcony seating, drawn c.1770, proposes a structure that holds the audience as if they were godly statues of a stacked temple, suspended… Read More

Alternative Histories: Nikolaus Bienefeld on James Gowan

Alternative Histories: Nikolaus Bienefeld on James Gowan

Die ersten Modelle einer Entwurfsskizze verkörpern den architektonischen Gedanken.So, wie die Skizze durch die Art des Striches, der Farbigkeit, der Detaillierung eine oder viele Interpretationen ermöglicht, so eröffnet die Wahl und der Umgang mit dem Material des Modells eine größtmögliche Offenheit im architektonischen Prozess. The first models of a design sketch… Read More

Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza

Alternative Histories: NoAarchitecten on Álvaro Siza

When we look at Siza’s drawing we try to forget the project we know. We see the beautiful irregularity of a pencil perimeter, defined by obstacles of all sorts. Within it, the architect added straight lines, an attempt to bring order and create a place to dwell, to find shelter.… Read More

Alternative Histories: Noreile Breen on Louis Kahn

Alternative Histories: Noreile Breen on Louis Kahn

Kahn’s drawing is composed of solid and dotted hard pencil lines with red hatching on coloured paper; conventions representing elements above, below and through a cut line. Parallel lines and breaks between lines give an indication of scale. Curious, massive, triangular, hollow and inaccessible forms meet broken lines in a… Read More

Alternative Histories: Oda Pälmke Architektin on Archizoom

Alternative Histories: Oda Pälmke Architektin on Archizoom

Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk

Alternative Histories: muf architecture/art on John Hejduk

John Hejduk’s drawing sketches a house for a couple, or two coupled houses, composed of two almost identical small buildings connected to each other by a walkway which holds each house at a distance apart. Each house has its own spiral stair for independent movement and what looks like its… Read More

Alternative Histories: Monadnock on James Stirling

Alternative Histories: Monadnock on James Stirling

All fragments of this illusionary city by Stirling are once more getting aroused.A re-assemblage brings the possibility for orchestrating a vertical narrative instead of the intended horizontal scheme.Gaining iconic strength, this reinterpretation of a reinterpretation – in an attempt of finding a new cohesion – opens up for new gestures.Gestures which are… Read More

Alternative Histories: Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten on Alvar Aalto

Alternative Histories: Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten on Alvar Aalto

Die Zeichnung zum Rathaus und Theater Jyväskylä bot uns weniger Anleitung für unsere Arbeit am Projekt alternative history, sondern eröffnete vielmehr einen Imaginationsraum – nicht zuletzt, weil der markante Rathausturm im Entwurf von Aalto gar nicht realisiert wurde. Unsere Recherche führte uns deshalb bald weiter. Über die Ansicht von Aaltos Malereien… Read More

Alternative Histories: Dierendonckblancke Architecten on Jean and HENRI Prouvé

Alternative Histories: Dierendonckblancke Architecten on Jean and HENRI Prouvé

Alternative Histories: AMUNT on Adolf Loos

Alternative Histories: AMUNT on Adolf Loos

Between 1925 and 1926, Adolf Loos designed a bourgeois villa with a salon, studio, rooms for servants and chauffeur for the writer Tristan Tzara and his wife, the painter Greta Knutson.  Buildings and the built environment reflect our society, and in turn express its social structures. Architecture is equally a… Read More

Alternative Histories: Loeliger Strub Architektur on Emil Hoppe

Alternative Histories: Loeliger Strub Architektur on Emil Hoppe