Medium: drawing

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Lisson to Tony Fretton

Tony Fretton and Ricardo Aboim Inglez

Tony Fretton founded his architectural practice (Tony Fretton Architects) in 1982 in London. He came into international prominence in 1991 after the completion of the second Lisson Gallery building, transforming the street into an urban setting to be absorbed by culture. From his house in London and over two hours,… Read More

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

Editors

In 1970 Pierre Restany and Guido Le Noci, director of the Apollinaire gallery, decided to celebrate, with the help of the municipality of Milan, the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Nouveaux Réalistes group. On 27 November, ten years after Yves Klein published his single-issue newspaper Le Dimanche 27… Read More

Protected: Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays

Protected: Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays

Nat Chard and Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Adrian Dannatt

Bringing the outside indoors, merging and blurring nature and culture, extending the garden into the study—such notions, a legacy of a generous North American sense of the landscape, from Fallingwater to the Case Study Houses, may have drifted into cliché but still, there is such glory to the actual open… Read More

Protected: From the Poetics of Reality to the Poetics of Memory

Protected: From the Poetics of Reality to the Poetics of Memory

Esin Kömez Dağlıoğlu

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

River Arno

River Arno

Ivo Poças Martins

In Florence, the flooding of the River Arno on November 4, 1966 was of a magnitude not seen in almost 500 years of history. The city, built on this alluvial plain, was flooded and the river overflowed its banks, filling areas as far away as the Piazza del Duomo with… Read More

Processing Process

Processing Process

Pablo Garcia

It is not Walter Gropius’ fault that his drawing for a single-family row house is strikingly dull. Even the towering figures of architecture, those revered creators of space and form, must, at times, strip their visions down to something much simpler. Clear, unadorned, almost utilitarian sketches become the necessary language… Read More

Protected: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

Protected: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Wang Shu: Drawing Uncommon Grounds

Wang Shu: Drawing Uncommon Grounds

Xin Jin

Despite the extensive literature on Chinese experimental architecture that emerged in the mid-1990s after the Cultural Revolution, architects’ reflections on and practices of representation remain under explored. Wang Shu (王澍), recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Prize, is a prominent figure in Chinese experimental architecture. Though widely acclaimed in the West… Read More

Protected: DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait

Protected: DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait

Elizabeth Merrill

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

DMJ – Of Ends and Origins: Raimund Abraham and the Birth of Architecture 

DMJ – Of Ends and Origins: Raimund Abraham and the Birth of Architecture 

Eliyahu Keller

Origin stories have a unique standing in the history of architectural thinking and imagination. They are textual, visual, and representational devices not only of what architecture aspires to be but of the world to which architecture responds and in which it operates. Effective origin stories produce the subjects which both… Read More

Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook

Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook

Catherine Howe

Zaha Hadid’s sketchbook for the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence (1979-1980), held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation with corresponding works at Drawing Matter, has proved invaluable for understanding her early career development of ideas. The project marked Hadid’s first professional solo endeavour, and she established her own office around the same… Read More

Protected: Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

Protected: Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

C.M. Howell

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The (Im)possible Palimpsest

The (Im)possible Palimpsest

Mattia De Lotto

Preceding the Campo Marzio plan, a plate named Scenographia Campi Martii offers a clue towards an understanding of Piranesi’s work—the terminology is fundamental, the word Scenographia is purposely chosen to make a direct link to the theatrical representation and scenic design, often investigated by Piranesi. The image presented in this… Read More

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Francis Martinuzzi

Last year, Francis Martinuzzi contacted Drawing Matter after seeing a reproduction of one of his drawings on our website. The drawing was from a project from the submission for his architectural diploma with Jean Faloux under the tutelage of Antoine Grumbach at Unité Pédagogiuqe no. 6 (L’École nationale supérieure d’architecture… Read More

Protected: Notes on Urban Form

Protected: Notes on Urban Form

Ingrid Schroder

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Pembroke’s Archives

Pembroke’s Archives

Alison Turnbull

Alison Turnbull was appointed lead artist for the Mill Lane development at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge in 2020. Drawing on objects from the College Archive and working in close collaboration with architects Haworth Tompkins and landscape architects Tom Stuart-Smith Studio, she has created permanent works for the new interior… Read More

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. As architectural typologies, abattoirs, boucheries, and slaughterhouses embody the civilising of animal slaughter; serving as concrete expressions of the culture of animal consumption. Over time, the slaughterhouse has evolved in both its structures and perceptions, from a small-scale, craft-based operation rooted in necessity,… Read More

Curtains

Curtains

Petra Blaisse and Sophie Wehtje

Brief email exchanges.  When meeting physically is out of the question, good old-fashioned correspondence still works, even if and for some time now, it is done electronically. This is how many of the editorial pieces on the Drawing Matter website come into being—through a chain of typed messages. It’s a… Read More

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

Nicholas Ray

It’s the sign of a good book about an architect that you want to drop everything and go out to visit, or re-visit, their buildings. And a sure indication of a good book that reproduces many architectural drawings is that you want to be able to pore over the originals… Read More

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Bahar Avanoğlu

‘Barely Traced, the true drawing escapes.’[1]  On a late night while reading Latife Tekin’s Zamansız (Timeless or Without Time)–a tale of love embedded in a lake, unfolded within the obscured semblances of a weasel and an eel–I found myself moving my lips, whispering: ‘Frii-iii-er-frii-ii-frii’. As I read the words printed on the paper, I… Read More

Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Reyner Banham

The building is in many ways as extraordinary as its details. At ground-floor level it confronts the visitor with a blank wall of hard-faced red brick, which is occasionally pierced with a rather private-looking doorway, except at the point where the glazed main-entrance lobby splits this defensive podium into two… Read More

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More

DMJ – A Will to the City

DMJ – A Will to the City

Lars Lerup

Nine unfinished drawings from 15 years ago; a text titled Phobos, which later appears in print; a story by Emilio Gadda and a brief encounter with agoraphobes; Denis Hollier’s work on Bataille’s aversion to monuments; Michel Serres’ Rome: The Book of Foundations; Aldo Rossi’s fabricca; Michel Foucault’s panopticism; Borges’ fear of mirrors; 50 years of sporadic visits to… Read More