Medium: drawing
Warburg’s Ellipse and Holden’s Grid
09.10.2026
Warburg’s Ellipse and Holden’s Grid09.10.2026
– Graham Haworth and Bill Sherman
This text is an edited and illustrated conversation between Bill Sherman (Director of the Warburg Institute) and Graham Haworth (Co-Founder of Stirling Prize-winning architects Haworth Tompkins. From 2018 to 2024, Haworth Tompkins worked with the Warburg Institute on the renovation and extension of its building in Bloomsbury—designed by Charles Holden… Read More
Asplund’s Villa Snellman: An Oblique View
08.10.2026
Asplund’s Villa Snellman: An Oblique View08.10.2026
Situated sometime and somewhere between Paul Cézanne and the Villa Savoye, in the second decade of the twentieth century, is Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Villa Snellman. The building was designed and constructed between 1917 and 1918 for a bank director, and is situated in Djursholm, a suburb of Stockholm. At first… Read More
Polyconal System Projected into the Unknown
05.10.2026
Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery
02.10.2026
Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery02.10.2026
– Luis Callejas and Julia Spackman
The following conversation has been adapted from a longer interview first published in Pairs 5, now including drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. * Julia Spackman (JS): This collection of snapshots by Katie Ladd of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery is a striking departure from its typical depiction.[1] For one, the… Read More
Freddie Phillipson: The Ulysses Project (Video)
01.10.2026
Freddie Phillipson: The Ulysses Project (Video)01.10.2026
On Bloomsday 2026—the single day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place—Freddie Phillipson presented and discussed drawings of Dublin as experienced in the novel, taken from his twenty-year exploration of Joyce’s landmark text. During the evening, Phillipson’s working and finished drawings were displayed in the Drawing Matter archive and he read from the… Read More
Protected: Mark Fisher: The Wall for Pink Floyd
28.09.2026
Protected: Mark Fisher: The Wall for Pink Floyd28.09.2026
– Editors
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
For Peter Salter
28.09.2026
For Peter Salter28.09.2026
1. Very few stories are narrated either to idealise or condemn: rather they testify to the always slightly surprising range of the possible. Although concerned with everyday events, they are mystery stories.[1] In an appreciation of Alison and Peter Smithson, Peter Salter spoke of them as skilled storytellers.[2] In particular,… Read More
‘Unschärfe’
24.09.2026
‘Unschärfe’24.09.2026
Four sketches and a photograph, scanned together, form a single drawing. Its pencil lines release an energy that condenses, figures, and elaborates without intention for the ruly. Quickly drawn and redrawn, slightly smudged, and enigmatically annotated, the top-left lines dwell on forces of form. Initially layered, subsequently intertwined. To their… Read More
Building a Site: Between Tradition and Modernity – Asplund’s Summerhouse in Stennäs
21.09.2026
Building a Site: Between Tradition and Modernity – Asplund’s Summerhouse in Stennäs21.09.2026
In 1936, four years before his death, Erik Gunnar Asplund designed his own house on a site with unique characteristics, irregular topography, and rocky outcrops. Known as the summerhouse in Stennäs, it remains a timeless architectural case study. The house embodies an architectural idea, a distinct approach to the tenets… Read More
An Interview with David Connor
18.09.2026
An Interview with David Connor18.09.2026
– Gianni Botsford and David Connor
* Gianni Botsford (GB): What I said that I could talk to you about is where it all started for you, how you learned to draw, where your drawing method came from, and how it developed over time. David Connor (DC): I did start to draw when I was 4 or 5, which would… Read More
The Indeterminate Building: Grimshaw’s ‘Action Factory’ for Herman Miller
15.09.2026
The Indeterminate Building: Grimshaw’s ‘Action Factory’ for Herman Miller15.09.2026
In 1975, following a closed competition during which Norman Foster and James Stirling were also approached, the Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership were invited to design a new factory for the American furniture company Herman Miller. Five years earlier, the company had set up a salesroom and workshop in Bath in the former… Read More
What’s in a Detail?
10.09.2026
What’s in a Detail? 10.09.2026
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
The House Without Character
07.09.2026
The House Without Character07.09.2026
– 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
04.09.2026
The Analogous City: Panel04.09.2026
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
03.09.2026
Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination03.09.2026
‘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
02.09.2026
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing02.09.2026
– 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’
28.08.2026
‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 28.08.2026
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
24.08.2026
Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation24.08.2026
– 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
21.08.2026
A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage21.08.2026
– 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
20.08.2026
Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 20.08.2026
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
17.08.2026
Models of Models: The House Transformed17.08.2026
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)
14.08.2026
BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)14.08.2026
– 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 – Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault
12.10.2026
DMJ – Where to Find a Drawing of a Swiss Gold Vault12.10.2026
– Ludo Groen
If you really want to learn where to find the mountain vaults of Swiss banks, and what they look like, the first thing you should know is that the archives vigilantly kept by almost all banks in Switzerland are not publicly accessible – and even when they are, the last… Read More
DMJ 3 – Storytelling plan