Medium: drawing

Protected: DMJ – Death Masks

Protected: DMJ – Death Masks

Kieran Cremin

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: And in the shadows, the section fades

Protected: And in the shadows, the section fades

Charlotte Erckrath

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Nicholas Ray

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

Protected: New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings

Protected: New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings

Charles Saumarez Smith

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield

James Gowan’s Trafalgar Road & East Hanningfield

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

Protected: Shadows in the work of Canaletto

Protected: Shadows in the work of Canaletto

Philip Steadman

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York

Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York

Stefan Davidovici

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

‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter

‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter

Charles Batach, Fabrizio Gallanti, Youssef Khobaiz, Marina Lathouri, Katerina Papanikolopoulos, Roberto Rodriguez and Freny Shah

This article tries to convey the collective exhilaration of a week-long seminar with Drawing Matter: five days, four writing exercises based on the analysis, observation and writing of archival and graphic material from the Drawing Matter Collection. Since 2014, the History and Critical Thinking postgraduate programme at the Architectural Association… Read More

Protected: The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age

Protected: The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age

Daniel Rosenberg

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: André des Gachons: Weather Warning

Protected: André des Gachons: Weather Warning

Mehdi Zannad

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The house stands still while life moves

Protected: The house stands still while life moves

Alessandro Mendini

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Photographing Drawings

Photographing Drawings

Jesper Authen

At Drawing Matter, we have a rule that when a new object enters the collection, it must be photographed and published within a month. With our capable photographer and her fancy equipment still in Somerset, we needed to find other ways of documenting new additions to the collection. We tried… Read More

Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos

Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos

Giles Reid

On 7th July 2025, an exhibition dedicated to architect Heinrich Kulka opened at the Ringturm Exhibition Centre in Vienna, titled Heinrich Kulka (1900–1971) – The Spatial Plan as a Design Method, focusing on Kulka’s European work, both with Adolf Loos and as an independent architect. It was curated by architect and writer… Read More

Arrows

Arrows

Laurent Stalder

The small drawing that adorns the title page of F. R. S. Yorke’s 1937 study, The Modern House in England, is typ­ical for its time. It shows an aerial perspective, made in thin black lines, of a conventional modern house with all its attributes. Cubic in shape, the house is… Read More

Protected: On Cedric Price

Protected: On Cedric Price

Andrea Branzi

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop

Raffael Baur, Patricia Guaita and Matthew Wells

For a fourth year, Drawing Matter hosted students from ENAC EPFL for a week-long workshop on survey drawings—this time not in a Somerset farmyard, but in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 400 yards east of the archive. The workshop was organised by Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur in collaboration with Drawing Matter,… Read More

On Measurement: A Survey of Florence

On Measurement: A Survey of Florence

Mojan Kavosh

The following text is an extract from a longer essay entitled ‘De re mensura: Surveying Practice in Quattrocento Painting’—which the author completed at the Warburg Institute in the autumn of 2025—looking at Renaissance perspective painting to consider how practices of surveying informed the development of perspective as an artistic and intellectual pursuit. *… Read More

Summer Evenings on Sukhna Dam

Summer Evenings on Sukhna Dam

Vikramaditya Prakash

Poornmashi. The bright full-moon nights of the year were always opportunities for us to try to convince our parents to organise a picnic at the Lake. Chandigarh is a long way from the ocean, way inland, surrounded by the vast Indo-Gangetic plains. And although the mighty Himalayas are right at… Read More

Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer

Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer

Mark Dorrian

Here, Mark Dorrian examines the theoretical history of the shadow and its evolving role in architectural drawing. The text acts as a word-and-image primer for the third colloquium event, jointly hosted by the RIBA and V&A Drawings Collections, and Drawing Matter, which will take place later this month—a day of… Read More

In the Archive: Kenneth Frampton in Conversation with Daniel Talesnik (Video)

In the Archive: Kenneth Frampton in Conversation with Daniel Talesnik (Video)

Kenneth Frampton and Daniel Talesnik

In this instalment of our ‘In the Archive’ series, eminent architectural historian Kenneth Frampton is joined by architect and curator Daniel Talesnik. Through drawings of built and unbuilt works by Ove Arup, Stirling & Gowan, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Patrick Hodgkinson, to name a few, the conversation ranges from… Read More

DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight

DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight

Willem de Bruijn

Architectural stories, almost by definition, construct narratives combining image and text. It is these combinations of the visual and the verbal that make architectural stories particularly compelling and memorable. ‘The Story of the Pool’ (1976) by Rem Koolhaas is a case in point. The script, written by Koolhaas, tells of… Read More

Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid

Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid

Editors

Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. After studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1968 to 1971, she moved to London in 1972, where she studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA). It was here that her work began to reference the Russian avant-garde,… Read More

To Table

To Table

Sara Gohberg

To table is to create the conditions for collective presence through food, space, event, and ritual; it is to host a gathering where practices and events—ranging from the everyday to the ceremonial, the spontaneous to the planned—become acts of social meaning-making. Also, as a verb, ‘to table’ conventionally carries a dual… Read More

The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

Nicholas Olsberg

‘Paris, 1927. I was in Lurçat’s studio on the rue Bonaparte looking for the first time at reproductions of the ‘Health House’ of Neutra. We young followers of the new architecture were both admiring and astounded by this signal of a revolution in building.’   Willy Boesiger, introducing Richard Neutra. Buildings and Projects (Zurich:… Read More