Medium: digital

Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project

Mies van der Rohe and the Universal Space Project

Landry Smith

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

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Richard Hall

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

Power & Public Space 2: Lauren Bon – Bending the River Back to the City

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

Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden

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

The Evolving Role of Drawing

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Do You Remember How Perfect Everything Was? The Work of Zoe Zenghelis (2021) – Review

Richard Hall

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’

Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’

Beth George

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

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

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

Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici

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

Decoding Wittgenstein’s Stonborough Villa

Akira Koyama

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

Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould

Charles Holland

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

El Croquis 208: DOGMA familiar/unfamiliar 2002–2021 (2021): Review

Leonard Ma

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

Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Heinrich Wolff and Ilze 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

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

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

Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance

Ahmed Belkhodja

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

The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review

Cammy Brothers

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

Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition

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

Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium

Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium

Matthew Wells

In July 1958, one day before Faisal II was assassinated during the 14 July Revolution in Baghdad, the Iraqi Ministry of Development sent a telegram to Paris confirming Le Corbusier’s appointment to design the Olympic Stadium. Over the following months, while the programme and site were being clarified, his office… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock

Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock

Job Floris and Fabrizio Gallanti

This is the seventeenth 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. Here, Fabrizio interviews Job Floris, co-founder of Mondanock, about their teaching studios at the EFPL and Harvard… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Luis Callejas

This is the sixteenth 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. Here, Luis Callejas (LCLA OFFICE) discusses his teaching studios at the Yale School of Architecture and the… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Grace Mortlock and David Neustein

This is the fifthteenth 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 Fabrizio talks to Grace Mortlock and David Neustein of the Sydney-based practice Other Architects… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Alfredo Thiermann

This is the fourteenth 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, Alfredo Thiermann reflects on his experience of drawing during a pandemic, in both… Read More