Medium: collage
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
9 February 2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)9 February 2023
– 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
The City of Design
9 January 2023
The City of Design9 January 2023
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
fala: collages
25 November 2022
fala: collages25 November 2022
– fala
This is the sixth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. fala started with collages. An abundance of images populated the internet; at some point, an online presence was decidedly claimed. Collages were the closest we… Read More
Fronts and Faces
7 October 2022
Fronts and Faces7 October 2022
The paper is cut without measuring. Rulers and set squares are neglected. Scissors are preferred over cutters and cutting mats. Circles are traced from nearby cups and glasses. The lines are never quite parallel. The edges are askew and the angles are uncertain. Alignments, perfect geometries and round numbers are… Read More
Gurdwara
1 September 2022
Gurdwara1 September 2022
Sikhism is the fifth-largest organised religion in the world. The gurdwara (a door to the guru, a teacher), sometimes referred to as the Sikh temple, is a place of worship for those of the Sikh faith. As a typology, it is under-explored in architectural academia – thought to be a… Read More
Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution
29 July 2022
Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution29 July 2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Markus Lähteenmäki
Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Markus Lähteenmäki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia. … Read More
Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing
28 July 2022
Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing28 July 2022
– Mark Dorrian and Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Drawing Matter is delighted to present three texts by Alberto Pérez-Gómez on architecture and its representation, the first writings by him to be carried on the Drawing Matter website. The first, ‘Architecture as Drawing’, is an early essay that initially appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1982, a… Read More
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller
11 July 2022
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller11 July 2022
We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More
Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)
29 June 2022
Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)29 June 2022
Although not a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Jan Tschichold was appointed to the selection committee for the Werkbund’s Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo), to be held in Stuttgart between May and June 1929. FiFo was one of the most ambitious attempts to showcase recent developments in photography. The… Read More
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence
7 April 2022
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence7 April 2022
In 1991, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron prepared a submission with the artist Remy Zaugg for the Berlin Morgen (‘Berlin Tomorrow’) exhibition organised by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. By surrounding Berlin’s Tiergarten with four new buildings, they proposed to restructure the park – then perceived as… Read More
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’
24 March 2022
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’24 March 2022
The provocation for this essay is Drawing Matter’s own: ‘we take the word “drawing” to be as much a verb as a noun…’ Drawing describes an act and a thing: both a process and the outcome of that process. There aren’t many English words like it, and many of them… Read More
Exhibition Design: Charging the Void
9 March 2022
Exhibition Design: Charging the Void9 March 2022
Last year at Cornell University, five students in Alessandra Cianchetta’s design studio Global Artscapes worked on designs for a gallery in the valley at Shatwell. For this, they used photographs and videos in default of a site visit. The brief was for an exhibition space to accommodate the display of… Read More
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam
24 January 2022
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam24 January 2022
The following text is a version of chapter three from Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image by Michael Young, published by Routledge © 2021. Available from Routledge. Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay ‘The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse’ published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects
17 November 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects17 November 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Ilze Wolff and Heinrich Wolff
This is the eighteenth 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, Heinrich Wolff and Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects discuss the production of their drawings,… Read More
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material
23 September 2021
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material23 September 2021
This is a narrative of listening: listening to materials, processes, place and self. When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment – you perceive, touch, and smell its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently, you register the space that surrounds you. During the initial… Read More
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)
16 September 2021
An Overwhelming Concern with Shelter! (1966)16 September 2021
The International Dialogue on Experimental Architecture (IDEA) was held at New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, Kent, 10–11 June 1966. The symposium was organised by Archigram and included contributions from Hans Hollein, Joe Weber, Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, Arthur Quarmsby, Anthony G. William and Reyner Banham. The following text is… Read More
Superstudio: Finding the Horizon
12 August 2021
Superstudio: Finding the Horizon12 August 2021
Until not too long ago, I would be asked to explain to youngsters accustomed to digital graphics how I used to make montages. I felt like an archaeologist, explaining how, in the Palaeolithic era, Neanderthals used to make their tools. Across several workshops, I have realised that the techniques today… Read More
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House
21 July 2021
Stirling & Gowan: The Isle of Wight House21 July 2021
– James Gowan, J. M. Richards, Laurent Stalder, James Stirling and Ellis Woodman
This first impetus for this article was provided by Laurent Stalder’s discussion of the sectional perspective drawing for the Isle of Wight house, reproduced here, which led us to J. M. Richards’ seminal essay, and then onward through the literature. In addition, we asked the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Canadian… Read More
Postcards: The Nature of images
21 July 2021
Postcards: The Nature of images21 July 2021
Our vision is simultaneously determined by the (past) historical structure of the work and by the present structure of the gaze that examines it, in which the accumulated glimpses of history often continue to operate.– Daniel Arasse Writing a postcard is the simplest thing in the world. Among other things,… Read More
Drawing the Brunswick Centre
19 July 2021
Drawing the Brunswick Centre19 July 2021
In the 1960s, when I was a penniless AA student, I used to produce perspective drawings for various offices to help pay the rent. Among them were the Smithsons, for whom I did several of the Economist, mainly interiors; Colquhoun and Miller, the chemistry building at Holloway College; YRM and… Read More
Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha
14 February 2023
Porto: Paving Work on Rua de António Sardinha14 February 2023
– Ivo 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
exhibition politics DMC civic & municipal