Medium: drawing
Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue
13.07.2022
Power & Public Space 3: Manuel Herz – Babyn Yar Synagogue13.07.2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Manuel Herz
Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Last year the Swiss practice Manuel Herz Architects completed a wooden synagogue West of Kyiv at Babyn Yar, the site of one… Read More
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller
11.07.2022
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller11.07.2022
We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More
Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden
06.07.2022
Power & Public Space 1: Liza Fior – The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden06.07.2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Liza Fior
Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: The Dalston Eastern Curve garden began as a meanwhile scheme, but over the past decade has embedded itself at the centre of… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24.06.2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24.06.2022
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II
17.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II17.06.2022
This is part two of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I
16.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part I16.06.2022
This is part one of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House
10.06.2022
Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House10.06.2022
A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century. Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it. A… Read More
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction
08.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction08.06.2022
This text introduces The Ulysses Project by architect Freddie Phillipson, his exploration of the relationship between the buildings of Dublin and James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, from 17 June – 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international… Read More
The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves
06.06.2022
The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves06.06.2022
In 1586 Domenico Fontana completed the extraordinary task, commissioned by Pope Sixtus V, of moving the Vatican obelisk. The structure was said to have a ‘mysterious magic of an unknown civilization’, accepted by Christians due to the belief that it had witnessed the martyrdom of Saint Peter. In this text, André… Read More
Opportunism
02.06.2022
Opportunism02.06.2022
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
While declaring explicitly architectural intentions (especially in the beginning), the enthusiastic appropriation of technologies and techniques peripheral to architecture has been a constant theme in OMA’s work. In 1976, Elia Zenghelis commented on the role of the telephone in their design process. [1] The photocopier and commercial printing would open up… Read More
Les Fêtes de Nuit (1937)
30.05.2022
Les Fêtes de Nuit (1937)30.05.2022
This is the best concise account of the technical sophistication behind the light and water installations created along and beside the Seine, for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937). We have added a group of gouache drawings by the architect René-André Coulon, made in the design phase for… Read More
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England
18.05.2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18.05.2022
During the upheavals of the Civil War, Westminster Abbey had functioned as the church of the state for the Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of Charles II, the Abbey resumed its historic role as the coronation church for English monarchs. [1] Parliament voted towards restoring the fabric, reinstituting its monarchical function… Read More
Robert Adam: The Long Gallery at Syon
13.05.2022
Robert Adam: The Long Gallery at Syon13.05.2022
– Stephen Astley, Adriano Aymonino, Markus Lähteenmäki and Frances Sands
On 18 December 2015, Frances Sands and Stephen Astley took out two leather-bound volumes from the Robert Adam Archive and laid them on the long table in the first-floor library at Sir John Soane’s museum. Adriano Aymonino and Markus Lähteenmäki, the initiators and editors of the Soane Oral Project, joined… Read More
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary
09.05.2022
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary09.05.2022
From eighteenth century primitive huts to the rise of barn living in the 1970s, buildings have served as the conceptual boundary between primordial formlessness and the organised world. But what if architecture begins with the very nature that it was invented to exclude? In 1971, the Madrilenian architect Fernando Higueras… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing
22.04.2022
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing22.04.2022
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [1] I knew very little about the eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam prior to June 2014. When challenged to respond to his drawings of the Long Gallery at Syon House, my impulse was to visit and draw my way through… Read More
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19.04.2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19.04.2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel
14.04.2022
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel14.04.2022
The plans of the Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel were drawn nearly two hundred years apart, and yet they both speak to the Ruskian timelessness of the ruin. The temple and chapel are representative of their respective ages, with the former alluding to Romanticism’s longing for a pastoral past free… Read More
The Being of Drawing (2021) – Review
04.04.2022
The Being of Drawing (2021) – Review04.04.2022
Joe Graham’s The Being of Drawing is the most recent book published by Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, the small press founded by the architect Gordon Shrigley in 2004. Marmalade’s catalogue of published titles challenges expectations of what a publishing house might be; to date, it has produced 12 books,… Read More
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid
22.03.2022
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid22.03.2022
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. On a crisp January morning I made my way to York railway station to visit… Read More
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City
21.03.2022
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City21.03.2022
– Paul Harrison and John Wood
We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review
18.07.2022
Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review18.07.2022
– Peter Carl
The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More
exhibition urban form literature