Medium: drawing

What’s in a Detail? 

What’s in a Detail? 

Enrico Miglietta

The following text appears in the recently published book The Drawing and the Space: Reflections on 10 Years of Design Research and Education, edited by Thierry Lagrange, Jo Van Den Berghe, Enrico Miglietta, and Liselotte Vroman. The book brings together a decade of work developed through design research and pedagogical… Read More

Protected: Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

Protected: Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The House Without Character

The House Without Character

Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song

Ever since I first encountered Arnulf Rainer’s Overpaintings in an exhibition, I was captivated by them. In 1954, he started to draw with oil crayons over photographs of himself, directly and spontaneously reacting to his own image. They are extremely powerful and honest, revealing a fundamental truth that photography on… Read More

The Analogous City: Panel

The Analogous City: Panel

Aldo Rossi

Having been asked to write about the panel exhibited at the Venice Biennale—entitled The analogous city, a joint work carried out with my friends Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart—it is worthwhile, I feel, posing a few general questions that arise prior to experiments or results of this kind.… Read More

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Lina Malfona

‘The drawing represents the medianic exploration of the shaded side of reason and, contradictorily, the scene of an ideal landscape in which the architect believes he will be happy. As the place of theoretical truth, the drawing institutes itself independently of architecture. Superior to architecture by the fact that it… Read More

Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing

Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing

Denise Scott Brown and Ariel Koltun-Fromm

The following interview is excerpted from a longer conversation between Ariel Koltun-Fromm and Denise Scott Brown which took place in April 2024 at her home in Philadelphia. It is part of a larger research project by Ariel investigating drawing as a means of interrogating existing places.  * Ariel Koltun-Fromm (AKF):… Read More

‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

Karl Kinsella

At the end of the twelfth century, Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), never one to mince his words, complained about a new fad of making drawings to illustrate biblical passages. Why, he wondered, were people creating convoluted diagrams to illustrate the ‘things’ that appear in the Bible, all those vessels, beasts,… Read More

Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation

Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation

Michael Gold and Dalibor Vesely

The following text, ‘The Dialogue of Representation’ by Dalibor Vesely, was published in People in Architecture, the book featuring the exhibition of work by Michael Gold’s AA Unit 5 students held at the Architectural Association, 4–29 October 1983. Read a response to the exhibition by Peter Wilson here.  Drawing Matter… Read More

A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage

A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage

Koenraad Van Cleempoel and Joshua Kempen

The revitalisation of the Hasselt Beguinage and its transformation into the Faculty of Architecture and Arts has created an opportunity to reconsider the role of drawing as a critical mode of inquiry in adaptive reuse. Rather than treating drawing as a purely representational tool, the project frames it as an… Read More

Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 

Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 

Anna Eglite

This collection of drawings documents a series of studies undertaken in the town of Seyðisfjörður in East Iceland. I first visited the town in the autumn of 2020. A few hours after I left, a landslide destroyed a large part of it. Although landslides have become more frequent in our… Read More

Models of Models: The House Transformed

Models of Models: The House Transformed

Kyle Miller

The house is architecture’s most overdetermined subject. It carries the weight of every disciplinary trope, cultural norm, political aspiration, and sentimental projection that can be placed on a building. To approach it critically—and to argue that its conventions have been an instrument of exclusion rather than a neutral container—is itself… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)

BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)

Editors

On Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 July, Drawing Matter presented an exhibition of drawings by BOLLES+WILSON (founded in London in 1980; based in Münster since 1988). The exhibition was the fourth in a series presenting the work of architects and practices that are represented in the Drawing Matter Collection by significant portfolios… Read More

DMJ – Storytelling by Omission: On Dixon Jones’s ‘Selective Axonometrics’

DMJ – Storytelling by Omission: On Dixon Jones’s ‘Selective Axonometrics’

Adam Sharr

Architectural drawings tell stories through what they omit as much as what they depict. This article explores the role of thoughtful omission in axonometric drawing through two drawings made by British practice Dixon Jones Architects from the 1990s. While architectural practice has come to favour photorealistic representations that present a… Read More

Drawing Motion as Thought

Drawing Motion as Thought

MRND

A design (can) begin in the domain of the barely articulate, where drawing operates less as representation than as an instrument for sensing forces that precede form. The early sketches that remain unseen—those made without the burden of explanation—constitute a theoretical ground in which motion is not depicted but pursued.… Read More

Figuring Out

Figuring Out

Issi Nanabeyin

OneThe cycle begins almost accidentally. Quick marks in the margins of books, scribbles hidden on the back of documents: these are selfless lines made on the nearest surface while talking aloud to others. They carry the residue of whatever the mind was working through at that moment. Their importance is… Read More

Cartography of a Wound

Cartography of a Wound

Laura del Pino

How do you draw a diamond mine? How do you depict a wound on the terrain, a spiral of extraction so powerful that it reorganises entire territories? On the sheet, the mine becomes a self-contained world—a floating territory of pits, conveyor belts, processing sheds, and housing blocks—but it also acts… Read More

Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Editors

Cedric Price (1934–2003) studied architecture at Cambridge University before receiving his diploma from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1957. He went on to teach at the AA and worked in the offices of Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before founding his own practice in 1960.  Though the majority of Price’s… Read More

Weave & Disturbance

Weave & Disturbance

Roberto Cides

Against a polyhedral, reticulated pale blue background, a pale terracotta network of ducts spreads out like ivy. It twists, branches, and folds back upon itself: a technological nervous system recording the temperature of the seventies. The drawing is precise, informative, and aesthetically autonomous. Ink and graphite on tracing paper. It… Read More

Three Drawings

Three Drawings

atelier local

This first drawing is not ours. It is a clumsy sketch that clients brought to our first meeting. Although not particularly legible, let alone well-proportionated, it carried the noble ambition of speaking about many things at once: it addressed everything, everywhere, all at once. Close inspection revealed three floor plans,… Read More

Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 

Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 

Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle

The following conversation between Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle, publishing director at RIBA, was conducted on 30 December 2021 and has been adapted from a text, originally presented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (Routledge, 2023). It traces the development of Cantley’s experimental drawing practice through Form:uLA—a body of work sustained since… Read More

Yes, And

Yes, And

Emily White

Tina Fey’s First Rule of Improvisation goes like this: If we’re improvising and I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun,’ and you say, ‘That’s not a gun. It’s your finger…’ our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun!’ and you say,… Read More

Time Theft

Time Theft

Jamie Lipson

* Jamie Lipson is a Canadian artist and architect. He received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Travelling Fellowship and Alpha Rho Chi medal. His son Orion turns 2 in July. This text is one of the selected responses to the… Read More

A Suite for the Absent Addressee

A Suite for the Absent Addressee

Oyat Shukurov

Prelude Construction has ceased abruptly. The inertia of instruction persists. When drawing is deprived of an addressee, the drift between the prescriptive and the descriptive intensifies. Act I: Villa Consider Villa Pisani Placco by Andrea Palladio, built for Francesco Pisani between 1552 and 1555 in Montagnana. Three elements are of interest:… Read More

Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper

Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper

Paolo Conrad-Bercah

My drawings are done on an unusual medium: newspapers. Around 2016, I began to draw on news–paper to try to counteract that inescapable status of newspapers themselves: conveying daily words that are often forgotten the next day, a condition reflected in an idiom of the English language—yesterday’s paper—used to refer… Read More