Medium: drawing

Protected: ‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

Protected: ‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

Karl Kinsella

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

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.

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: Colour in Architectural Drawings

Protected: Colour in Architectural Drawings

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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