Medium: drawing

Folding Landscapes: The Maps of Tim Robinson

Folding Landscapes: The Maps of Tim Robinson

Declan Quirke

While walking the land, I am the pen on the paper; while drawing this map, my pen is myself walking the land. I wanted to short circuit the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity, and try keep faith with reality. – Robinson We should maintain an awareness of the stories hidden… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Pan Scroll Zoom 14: Alfredo Thiermann

Alfredo Thiermann

This is the fourteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Alfredo Thiermann reflects on his experience of drawing during a pandemic, in both… Read More

The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion

The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion

Stacey Lewis

Peter Märkli’s hand-drawn section of the ancient monument Hagia Sophia (532–7) is part of a working process developed alongside his design work. The output is a collection of investigative drawings that document sacred archetypal buildings, and articulate his resolved thesis that ‘architecture has a language’.   The drawing illustrates a system… Read More

Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh

Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh

José Oubrerie

Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the first in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she will comment on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues.  Late last… Read More

The Over Under: Drawing as process

The Over Under: Drawing as process

Peter William Rae

The Over Under series is a look at drawing as process, but in this instance, not the process of designing a building or object, but rather an amplification and deepening of the reality we encounter. Reality here begins with a place but has since transformed into working and imagining through… Read More

Insignificance 3: Mourning Work

Insignificance 3: Mourning Work

Gordon Shrigley

All drawings contain traces of all previously drawn mediations. [1] All drawings are silent acts of memorialising (by employing inter-subjective readings of iconography, lineage, parody, reverie and reflexivity) what has been drawn before, or thought to have been so, or simply, what has been, consciously misplaced. [2] The text above… Read More

The Future City

The Future City

Paul Maher

Antonio Sant’Elia foresees the technological cities of the mid to late 20th century. High-rise towers shooting skyward, train lines and highways articulated as horizontally streaking into vanishing points, and aeroplanes arriving and departing omnidirectionally. Similarly, Winold Reiss’s Future City: Study for a Mural, is an homage to technological advancement, and… Read More

Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh

Notes on The Palace of the Assembly and Museum at Chandigarh

José Oubrerie

Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… Read More

Cartographies of the Imagination

Cartographies of the Imagination

Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah

Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More

An Everyday Detail

An Everyday Detail

Priit Jürimäe

Representation of architectural design often focuses on a limited number of sources – artistic conceptual sketches and diagrams, dreamy computer-generated renders, or carefully curated photographs of the finished building. These three media capture the continuity of the concept and can stand on their own right.  The mundane reality of architectural… Read More

Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church

Peekaboo! Stanford White and the Mystery Lantern for Madison Square Presbyterian Church

H. Horatio Joyce

Up until the turn of the twentieth century architectural renderings tended to be created for clients early in the design process to give them an idea of how a proposed building would look. At that point however they began to be used more widely for publicity purposes as well, thanks… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao

Tatiana Bilbao and Fabrizio Gallanti

This is the thirteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Fabrizio interviews Tatiana Bilbao about her teaching at Yale School of Architecture and… Read More

Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre

Hans Poelzig: Decorating the Empty Centre

Hana Nihill

‘Artists such as Poelzig, prevented from building in real life, have been driven to create Expressionist cinema architecture […] But in the long run, pasteboard fantasy creations […] can never be satisfying fodder for the architect; he has an inner urge to conceive and erect buildings in which real people… Read More

I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day

I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day

Marie-Henriette Desmoures

With a circumference of approximately 10cm, I compress the majestic mountain. I pressure it between my fingers and the board and I slice. The contours fall on the board; in a matter of minutes, they will turn once more into a fragrant and luminous mountain. The emotional downpour induced by… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

Peter Wilson

Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More

Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis

Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis

Charlotte Hart

This study of Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis was made by Pascal Coste (b. 1787 Marseille, France) in 1840 as part of an archeological survey of the Persian City of Persepolis. Through a combination of plan and perspective, Coste portrayed the symmetrical arrangement and elaborate construction of the ancient… Read More

68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt

68½ degrees, Sverre Fehn and the Nordic Pavilion: Review & Excerpt

Niall Hobhouse

Review By preserving the trees on the site within his pavilion in the Giardini, Sverre Fehn offered Venice an insight into a unique Nordic sensitivity towards nature and the environment. He tempered the harsh Mediterranean sun to evoke the horizontal light of the Baltic through a spectacularly innovative technical design… Read More

biq: Revealing Construction

biq: Revealing Construction

Neil Middleton

The French Modernist Auguste Perret is famously quoted as saying that ‘Construction is the mother tongue of the architect. The architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in terms of construction’.  If this is the case, and given drawings are the primary communication tool for architects, it is perhaps… Read More

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Olivier Bellflamme

It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More

Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva

Evocation of Solemnity: Temple of Minerva

Rodrigo Dominguez

For the curious visitor that approaches the historic remains of the Temple of Minerva Medica in Rome, it will take a lot of effort to contextualize the building as it could have once been. That which before had allowed for a gentle processional approach to the ruin has now been… Read More

Notes on the 2020 Summer School: Encounters in landscape

Notes on the 2020 Summer School: Encounters in landscape

Marwa El Mubark

The notion of the countryside as a space for radical transformation, a messy intersection of heterogeneity far removed from the homogenising forces of the city centre, makes it the perfect territory for experimentation. As a landscape where change is the only context, Shatwell Farm is the ideal setting for an… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Elizabeth Hatz

This is the twelfth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Elizabeth Hatz discusses her personal experience of the pandemic and its consequences for… Read More

To assist

To assist

Ruben Casqero

Computer Assisted Drawings (CAD) have existed since the mid-60s. A young Ivan Sutherland received a doctorate at MIT introducing Sketchpad, a device that by the means of an optical pen allowed the direct edition of graphical objects. Around the 35th century BC, someone was writing the first hieroglyph text over… Read More