Medium: drawing

The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan

The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan

Anthony Vidler

The interesting note by Neil Jackson tying Gowan and his Isle of Wight House to the bi-nuclear plans of Breuer and then to Craig Ellwood’s Hillsborough House, reminds me of Stirling’s own early interest in Breuer, whose Connecticut work he saw during his 1948 internship in New York during his… Read More

Sketches from Algiers

Sketches from Algiers

Adam Voelcker

In October 1975 I returned to Cambridge to complete my architecture course. I had spent my year out in London with MacCormac and Jamieson, an exciting time as it was early days for this young practice and I was one of their very first assistants. In fact, I nearly didn’t… Read More

Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House

Steeling Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight House

Neil Jackson

The editors were thrilled to receive this response from Neil Jackson to our publication of drawings and literature relating to Stirling & Gowan’s Isle of Wight house. We are always interested in receiving comments and feedback from our readers: editors@drawingmatter.org.  In taking the plan of the Stirling & Gowan’s Isle… Read More

Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive

Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive

Gordon Shrigley

Whoever decides to study the conditions of a practice of imagining architecture through/as line will, I am afraid, be left in despair. Once the theatrical mask of line’s incontrovertible instrumentality is seen to slip, line’s solidity, its all too evident honesty as a simple mimetic tool, turns up by and… Read More

Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House

Cassius Goldsmith’s Grey Weather Gate House

Marie-Henriette Desmoures

I find myself lost in the woods, then reorientated, guided by the centralised chimney. Standing dead centre in front of the gate lodge, my gaze is lifted to the space between chimney and sky, between foreground or background. A cloud of white smoke disguises itself as an English cloud, passing… Read More

The James Clarke Remake

The James Clarke Remake

Oscar Binder and Nikolaus Podlaha

In 1989 the architect James Clarke was commissioned to propose a design for the new Multimedia Library of Mr. Yamamoto in Tokyo, Japan. Although never built, and only a handful of sketches were ever published in some obscure magazines of the mid 90s, the drawings were highly praised by the… Read More

Drawing the Brunswick Centre

Drawing the Brunswick Centre

Birkin Haward

In the 1960s, when I was a penniless AA student, I used to produce perspective drawings for various offices to help pay the rent. Among them were the Smithsons, for whom I did several of the Economist, mainly interiors; Colquhoun and Miller, the chemistry building at Holloway College; YRM and… Read More

Forced Migrations, Barriers and Vanishing Asylums

Forced Migrations, Barriers and Vanishing Asylums

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the second in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she comments 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. Read the introduction to the series,… Read More

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

Frank Bauer

Along with his Do Hit Chair (2000), a pristine stainless steel box measuring 1000 x 700 x 750 mm, Dutch-born designer Marijn van der Poll supplies a sledgehammer. In an act of brute physical force he requires the user to expressively sculpt his own seating morphology, not only allowing but… Read More

36 Elevations

36 Elevations

Calum Storrie

I began this series of drawings with something else in mind. The first picture was to be drawn freehand, but I took a wrong turn straight away by setting up a structure using a set-square around which the composition would be based. I realised that the structure was already a… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 15: Other Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Grace Mortlock and David Neustein

This is the fifthteenth 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 talks to Grace Mortlock and David Neustein of the Sydney-based practice Other Architects… Read More

Luc Deleu & T.O.P. OFFICE: Future Plans, 1970–2020 (2021) – Review

Luc Deleu & T.O.P. OFFICE: Future Plans, 1970–2020 (2021) – Review

Victoria Easton

Future Plans is one of those titles with double and ambiguous meanings. Not exactly as twofold as the most famous ‘The Architecture of the City’ but maybe leaving us equally free to choose. Is the term ‘future’ to be considered as an adjective or a subject? Does this book thus… Read More

Shatwell Farm: A Step Up

Shatwell Farm: A Step Up

John Glew

Imagined as something in between a small building or piece of furniture and a block for mounting a horse, these steps are a shortcut to an out-of-sight sauna that sits above a slope amongst the trees. They are directly visible when leaving the dairy house, sitting to one side of… Read More

The Cottage at Bromley

The Cottage at Bromley

Tim Anstey and Mari Lending

Enjoyable finds in archives often emerge between the lines. Inside RIBA Collections, which is organised to form a narrative celebrating architects and their works, we found a gem of modern cultural history, consisting of three architectural plans and four letters (ten pages altogether, eight in transcript, two typed). [1] The… Read More

Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential

Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential

Louis Mayes

Below is a sketch of a traditional South Korean Pojagi (a handcrafted patchwork tapestry) drawn by Florian Beigel. Described as ‘beautifully unsure’, it shows the importance of the sketch in translating between a reference and the key concept of the Pojagi House, designed by Beigel and the Architectural Research Unit… Read More

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