Medium: digital
Queensway, Hong Kong
4 November 2022
Queensway, Hong Kong4 November 2022
What I knew of Hong Kong before I moved here came from film and photography. It was a dense, post-modern city that in earlier decades had been characterised by its economic success. Since the turn of the century, the city has been pummelled by shocks and anxieties. Life in Hong… Read More
fala: renders
28 October 2022
fala: renders28 October 2022
– fala
This is the fourth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Low-resolution images are humble and straightforward. The textures are blunt and the colours are strong. Ambient occlusion is mostly off. Light, shadows and reflections are rarely under… Read More
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing
21 October 2022
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing21 October 2022
– Federica Goffi and Devon Moar
The bee drawing(s) by Devon Moar illustrate that changes in scale imply a passage of time. One drawing here becomes many drawings, each marking a different moment of discovery unfolding a process. One could say that when it comes to architectural media, there are two types of scales dealing with… Read More
fala: wireframes
17 October 2022
fala: wireframes17 October 2022
– fala
This is the third of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Wireframes are snapshots of three-dimensional models built solely from lines. Single-line plans and sections are extruded to form a light envelope. Its colours dismantle the… Read More
Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project
30 August 2022
Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project30 August 2022
I must say that I was far more riveted by another Mies . . . who, in perfect International Style manner continued to insist on architecture and the production of truth as generated by a set of a priori and universalizing laws, and who was caught up in the entirely… 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
Power & Public Space 2: Lauren Bon – Bending the River Back to the City
8 July 2022
Power & Public Space 2: Lauren Bon – Bending the River Back to the City8 July 2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Lauren Bon
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: The concrete-lined LA River was built on top of a sprawling floodplain, which the land artist Lauren Bon seeks to reveal through… Read More
Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden
6 July 2022
Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden6 July 2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Liza Fior
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: The Dalston Eastern Curve garden began as a meanwhile scheme, but over the past decade has embedded itself at the centre of… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29 April 2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29 April 2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review
26 April 2022
Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review26 April 2022
During the spring and summer of 2021, a two-part exhibition of the work of Zoe Zenghelis was shown in London. The first show was an enjoyably intimate immersion at Betts Project in Clerkenwell. The second, a more extensive review at the Architectural Association. Later that year a thick, crisply designed… 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
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti
7 February 2022
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti7 February 2022
– Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac
The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici
19 January 2022
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici19 January 2022
– Pier Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Gallanti and Maria S. Giudici
This is the nineteenth 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, he talks to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici. Pan Scroll Zoom: Teaching… Read More
Decoding Wittgenstein’s Stonborough Villa
18 January 2022
Decoding Wittgenstein’s Stonborough Villa18 January 2022
God does not reveal himself in the world. The facts all belong only to the task and not to its performance. — Ludwig Wittgenstein [1] In the 1980s, the beginning of widespread personal computing, we didn’t buy readymade software like today. Every night found me frantically writing a thousand lines… Read More
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould
11 January 2022
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould11 January 2022
The cover of early editions of John Summerson’s book The Classical Language of Architecture features a curious drawing of a Doric entablature. To all intents and purposes the profile of the entablature is correct, but it has been extruded through the method of oblique projection. It is as if we… Read More
El Croquis 208: DOGMA familiar/unfamiliar 2002–2021 (2021): Review
29 November 2021
El Croquis 208: DOGMA familiar/unfamiliar 2002–2021 (2021): Review29 November 2021
As one of the most prominent architecture publications in the world, El Croquis has long been a prestige showcase for the upper echelon of architectural practices. Its publication format, with each issue typically devoted to a specific practice, lends El Croquis more the air of an exclusive monograph series than… 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
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona
16 November 2021
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona16 November 2021
– Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac
This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More
Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance
4 November 2021
Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance4 November 2021
Negatives Of the 120,027 items included in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 16,010 are part of the collection called ‘Architecture’, and 22,877 are filed as ‘Negative film’. Astonishingly, only one entry sits in both: ‘Ensemble de 12 négatifs couleur (4 pour le projet Bizan, 6 pour le… Read More
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review
18 October 2021
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review18 October 2021
Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition
13 October 2021
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition13 October 2021
– Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo
This conversation between Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo was first published, in German translation, in issue 238 of ARCH+ (March 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the editors of ARCH+ for allowing us to publish the original English version of the text. Momoyo Kaijima: With… Read More
The City of Design
9 January 2023
The City of Design9 January 2023
– Emilio Ambasz
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
theoretical & imaginary landscape