Medium: drawing
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
Protected: Tracing Air with Light
06.03.2026
Protected: Tracing Air with Light06.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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
‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter
05.02.2026
‘ONE’ — A Workshop at Drawing Matter05.02.2026
– 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: André des Gachons: Weather Warning
02.02.2026
Protected: André des Gachons: Weather Warning02.02.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: The house stands still while life moves
27.01.2026
Protected: The house stands still while life moves27.01.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Photographing Drawings
27.01.2026
Photographing Drawings27.01.2026
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
23.01.2026
Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos23.01.2026
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
19.01.2026
Arrows19.01.2026
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
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop
15.01.2026
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop15.01.2026
– 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
12.01.2026
On Measurement: A Survey of Florence12.01.2026
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
08.01.2026
Summer Evenings on Sukhna Dam08.01.2026
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
Protected: The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’
09.03.2026
Protected: The Architectural Competition: Shopfront to ‘The Trade’09.03.2026
– Harry Foley
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
commerce DMC Open Call: Visibility, and the Unseen competition