Medium: drawing
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio
26.03.2026
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio26.03.2026
The Drawing Matter collection holds around 70 objects that speak to Italy’s architectural evolution in the early twentieth century. It should be noted that this period was characterised by tremendous stylistic diversity, with movements and groups—often unhappily—coexisting and shifting, ultimately culminating in the dominance of the Stile Littorio. At the… Read More
Protected: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture
24.03.2026
Protected: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture24.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Shadows in the work of Canaletto
23.03.2026
Shadows in the work of Canaletto23.03.2026
Canaletto used a camera obscura to trace the architecture of Venice on site.[1] He used the camera sketches in turn to produce finished drawings and paintings. Fig.1 reproduces two pages from Canaletto’s sketchbook, his quaderno, now in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. They show the Campo and Church of SS Giovanni… Read More
The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’
20.03.2026
The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’20.03.2026
Alexander Scott Carter’s winning designs for single and double-fronted W.H. Smith shopfronts form a remote bookend to a troubled time for architectural competitions in Britain. The other arrived approximately 75 years earlier in the form of a satirical drawing produced to open Augustus Pugin’s Contrasts (1836). It too was a… Read More
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House
19.03.2026
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House19.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
André des Gachons: Weather Warning
19.03.2026
André des Gachons: Weather Warning19.03.2026
The recent publication, La Veille du ciel: aquarelles météorologiques (Phénomène éditions), one of the most beautiful books published in 2025, gathers together forty years of daily weather reports by André des Gachons on the skies above the small rural commune of La Chaussée-sur-Marne, in eastern France. Des Gachons remained subjective… Read More
Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing
18.03.2026
Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing18.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Time Theft
17.03.2026
Protected: Time Theft17.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House
13.03.2026
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House13.03.2026
The sole drawing by Sergei Eisenstein in the Drawing Matter archive is a set design for a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) from 1922. It is a rare, interdisciplinary confluence of a socialist Irish playwright (Shaw), a Russian filmmaker and theorist (Eisenstein), and a radical theatre maker… Read More
And in the shadows, the section fades
13.03.2026
And in the shadows, the section fades13.03.2026
On the black cartridge, a veil of pigments builds up, articulates an edge and fades into the depth. And yet it is the edge that meets me first, together with all the other edges that are layered upon each other. Cascading contrasts of white and black. Or: of brightness and darkness. Now… Read More
Shadowed plans
11.03.2026
Shadowed plans11.03.2026
Drawing Matter holds in its collection a plan by Superstudio architects Carlo Chiappi and Adolfo Natalini for the 1967 competition for the restoration of the Fortezza da Basso—a 16th-century fort in Florence—and its transformation into a National Centre for Arts and Crafts.[1] The drawing combines traditional plan-making techniques with remarkable… Read More
Massinissa Selmani
09.03.2026
Massinissa Selmani 09.03.2026
The nomination of the Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani for the 2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp was an official acknowledgement that a practice grounded primarily in pencil drawing on paper on a modest scale can constitute a major contribution to contemporary art.[1] In Selmani’s abbreviated aesthetic, weighty ideas are carried by the… Read More
DMJ – Death Masks
06.03.2026
DMJ – Death Masks06.03.2026
This series of drawings is part of a larger project titled Tracking Blood Meridian, which explores the work of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. The sketchbook pages are developed as studies for landscape-like death masks that relate to members of the nineteenth-century Glanton gang, on whose exploits McCarthy’s 1985 novel… Read More
Protected: Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio
03.03.2026
Protected: Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio03.03.2026
– Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Levers Long Enough to Move the World
03.03.2026
Levers Long Enough to Move the World03.03.2026
‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’ — Archimedes Levers Long Enough to Move the World is an exhibition of architectural sketches curated by Andrew Holder at the Pratt School of Architecture, featuring the work of 62 contemporary… Read More
New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings
02.03.2026
New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings02.03.2026
This text is published to mark the opening of John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture at Sir John Soane’s Museum (4 March–28 June 2026), co-curated by Charles Saumarez Smith and Roz Barr. More information about the exhibition can be found here. In the summer of 1982, when I was at… Read More
The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age
27.02.2026
The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age27.02.2026
Part 1: The Brick Pencil In a colour photograph with the rich saturation of Kodachrome, against an aquamarine background, a manicured hand grips an upright brick. Taped to the brick, tip down, is a pencil. The weight of the brick is palpable. Someone is working hard to write with this… Read More
Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza
24.02.2026
Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza24.02.2026
– Editors
At Drawing Matter, I had long hoped that we could play some part in the transition of the Álvaro Siza archive from his personal holdings to the public realm. Ten years ago, over many meetings with Siza, Nicholas Olsberg and I had agreed that the collection at Drawing Matter might… Read More
Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo
16.02.2026
Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo16.02.2026
Open any book by a Dutch architect and you are bound to come across H. P. Berlage—the forefather from whom sprang everything, albeit indirectly, from the Amsterdam School to Der Stijl and who is revered for his contribution at all scales from the details of his buildings to his town… Read More
James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield
12.02.2026
James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield12.02.2026
– Vera Okodugha and Ana Francisco Sutherland
To mark the publication of Ana Francisco Sutherland’s remarkable compendium of the modern buildings of Greenwich and Blackheath, this post is presented as a ‘project scrapbook’ that traces two of James Gowan’s social housing projects, Trafalgar Road, London, built between 1964 and 1968, and East Hanningfield, Essex, finished in 1978.… Read More
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York
09.02.2026
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York09.02.2026
Steinberg is for me, first of all, the New Yorker magazine—one of the most intelligent and open American publications, with a very distinct graphic style that includes a generous use of drawings and cartoons, born and fed by the amazingly rich cultural landscape of New York City. I see New York… Read More
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural
30.03.2026
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural30.03.2026
– Matt Page
Drawing Matter holds a large number of drawings, prints and other materials relating to a project for an office building in Kansas City designed by Louis Kahn. The project was one of the last that the architect worked on before his death in 1974, and many of the drawings carry… Read More
travel DMC tracing shadows sketch