Medium: drawing

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

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

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

Koenraad Van Cleempoel and Joshua Kempen

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The House Without Character

Protected: The House Without Character

Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

The Visual Origins of Circulation in Architecture

The Visual Origins of Circulation in Architecture

Fabio Colonnese

Amidst the architecture historians, the comparison between the plan of Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and that of one of Bramante’s four pillars supporting the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica is well-known. Though I could not find the name of the historian who conceived it, it definitely… Read More

Gothic Design(ation)s

Gothic Design(ation)s

Zachary Stewart

Towards the end of an illustrious career as an administrator, an ambassador, a royal confidant, and one of the wealthiest men in Europe, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester (1447/8–1528) followed in the footsteps of many a medieval grandee eager to ensure an enduring legacy, which is to say he commissioned… Read More

Collection Guide: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Collection Guide: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Martin Bressani

The French Neo-Gothic architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century architecture worldwide. He transformed the restoration and interpretation of medieval monuments, championed structural rationalism, and reinvented drawing and publishing as tools for disseminating architectural knowledge. By the time of his death, he had become the… Read More

DMJ – SMS to Eternity

DMJ – SMS to Eternity

Peter Wilson

Marlon and Elvis lived on opposite sides of Cutlers Wood.They were friends.They were immortal.One day Marlon sent Elvis an SMS: Marlon – Hey Elvis, cool cat, why don’t we see each other more often,We could talk about that geek Warhol who put us here! Elvis – Sure, but I am scared to… Read More

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

Manuel Orazi

‘In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection’ —Andrei Tarkovsky Italian culture has always produced artists who were attardé, either… Read More

Protected: The Temple

Protected: The Temple

Clive Aslet

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Blow Up: Dante Bini and His House for a Film Director

Blow Up: Dante Bini and His House for a Film Director

Will McLean

On July 4th, 1964, in Crespellano on the outskirts of Bologna, Italian architect Dante Bini successfully constructed (in less than three hours) a 12m diameter, 6m high, hemispherical reinforced concrete shell structure using the unique pneumatic formwork of a giant balloon. As a student, Dante Bini had studied and admired… Read More

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

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

Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Collection Guide: Peter Wilson & BOLLES+WILSON

Collection Guide: Peter Wilson & BOLLES+WILSON

Editors

Peter Wilson and Julia Bolles are the founding partners of Architekturbüro BOLLES+WILSON. Peter Wilson was born in Australia, he studied architecture at the University of Melbourne and the Architectural Association, where he later taught from 1974–1988 (Diploma Unit Master 1980–88). Julia Bolles was born in Münster and graduated from the Karlsruhe Institute of… Read More

Unseen Bodies

Unseen Bodies

Christine Bjerke

This drawing explores how the human body has been depicted, understood, and imagined in Danish architectural and design education over the past 270 years. It represents a study of more than two hundred public and private archival materials sourced from various contemporary educational institutions, libraries, and archives across Denmark.[1] The… Read More

Invented from Copies

Invented from Copies

Neil Bingham

In 1980, Fred A. Stitt, the doyen of American authors of handbooks on the technical and managerial aspects of architectural practice, defined the distinction between drawing and copy drafting (to use the American spelling of draughting) in uncompromising terms: Drawing is an originating process: a creative, aesthetic, and problem-solving process.… Read More

The Primacy of Drawing

The Primacy of Drawing

Roger Malbert

The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge’s magisterial survey of the place of drawing in European art since the Renaissance, was first published by Yale University Press in 2010. Weighing in at 520 pages, it was a formidable achievement of vast erudition and profound insight, the fruits of more than two… Read More

DMJ – Show

DMJ – Show

Freddie Phillipson

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? James Joyce, Ulysses 17.2328-32 [1] Night-time on Eccles Street. Someone is half-dreaming of a mythical bird—a roc—in the Arabian… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove – La maison où j’ai grandi

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove – La maison où j’ai grandi

Adrian Dannatt

This is the eighth and concluding part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series here. * Curtains The newly restored house appeared, on the cover no… Read More

The Right to Imagine: Michael Sorkin’s Visual Argument

The Right to Imagine: Michael Sorkin’s Visual Argument

Marina Correia

On the wall of the third-floor mezzanine of the Spitzer School of Architecture of The City College of New York (CCNY) hangs a wood model titled Urbanagram. It was the product of a collaboration of students of the Master’s in Urban Design Program, directed for almost two decades by Michael Sorkin… Read More

Concept of Proof

Concept of Proof

Beth George

We talk of the invisible drawings that birth a project, but words persistently catalyse and crystallise thought, providing spur or anchor for the meandering of mind and hand in the extrication of architectures. Publication, specification, contract, critique—words. Our history and very conceptual frameworks rely on the productive and ‘dangerous inversions… Read More

Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds

Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds

Peter Sealy

In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes the first hundred pages of his bestselling 1980 novel as a form of penance, ‘for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterwards.’[1] Beyond creating an easy heuristic for who should or should not descend further into the world of… Read More

Vanbrugh in the Best Light: Sir John Soane’s Lecture Drawings of Blenheim Palace

Vanbrugh in the Best Light: Sir John Soane’s Lecture Drawings of Blenheim Palace

Frances Sands

The architect Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) is currently enjoying a moment in the sun! 2026 marks the tercentenary of his death and a variety of activities have been organised to celebrate and reassess this most dynamic of British architects, under the banner of ‘Vanbrugh 300’, which is being coordinated by… Read More