Medium: drawing

Protected: Mark Fisher: The Wall for Pink Floyd

Protected: Mark Fisher: The Wall for Pink Floyd

– Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

For Peter Salter

For Peter Salter

– Mark Dorrian

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

Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

– Editors

Alberto Ponis was born in the small port suburb of Nervi in Genoa, in 1933. He was the son of Mario A. Ponis, who owned a textile production company called MITA, which introduced him early on to many Italian artists and designers of the 20th century. The company had worked… Read More

‘Unschärfe’

‘Unschärfe’

– Fabian Tobias Reiner

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

Building a Site: Between Tradition and Modernity – Asplund’s Summerhouse in Stennäs

– Mafalda Ribeiro

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

An Interview with David Connor

– 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

The Indeterminate Building: Grimshaw’s ‘Action Factory’ for Herman Miller

– Matt Page

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? 

What’s in a Detail? 

– Enrico Miglietta

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

The House Without Character

– 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

The Analogous City: Panel

– Aldo Rossi

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

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

– Lina Malfona

‘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

Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing

– 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’ 

‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

– Karl Kinsella

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

Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation

– 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

A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage

– 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 

Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 

– Anna Eglite

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

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