Medium: drawing
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office
9 September 2024
DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office9 September 2024
Sir John Soane’s drawing offices at Nos 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the fulcrum of his practice between 1794 and his retirement in 1833. His unique surviving ‘upper’ office was restored in 2022–23. In this article, I will trace the history of the office and recount its use… Read More
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect
2 September 2024
Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect2 September 2024
– Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki
It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project
29 August 2024
OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project29 August 2024
This is the fourth post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
26 August 2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas26 August 2024
– Erin Besler, Marshall Brown, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
A Missing Drawing
22 August 2024
A Missing Drawing22 August 2024
Being casualy in the Privy Gallery at White-hall, his Majestie [Charles II] gave me thanks (before divers Lords & noble men) for my Book of Architecture & Sylva againe: That they were the best designed & usefull for the matter & subject, the best printed & designd (meaning the Tallè doucès [engravings] of the Paralelles) that… Read More
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows
19 August 2024
Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows19 August 2024
– Holger Kleine and Anna Kostreva
‘The architecture of agency is the architecture of the cemetery. The power to change is the power to say goodbye.’ (Epigraph, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows) ‘The cemetery is a place made for the living to spatialize their emotions; certain things can happen there that can’t happen in other places.’… Read More
Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno
16 August 2024
Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno16 August 2024
The following text was first presented at the 2021 edition of the Lucerne Talks, the biennial Symposium on Pedagogy in Architecture at HSLU’s School of Engineering and Architecture in Lucerne; Drawing Matter’s Niall Hobhouse and Matt Page also took part, with their text Quantum Collecting. It was later published as… Read More
Drawings as Cosmovisions
12 August 2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12 August 2024
My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge
9 August 2024
The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge9 August 2024
The war to restore to churches ritual and at the same time architectural dignity was waged by one man and one society, the man being a fervent convert to Catholicism, the society calling itself Catholic too, but meaning what is called Anglo-Catholic. They operated independently, but appreciated one another. The… Read More
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate
5 August 2024
Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate5 August 2024
Many people reach a point in their lives at which they realise that they should protest the status quo. Some people make the realisation but remain frustrated, stuck, or blocked from enacting the necessary change. How do we face, name, and act according to our most fundamental realisations and what… Read More
DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida
1 August 2024
DMJ – Brunel’s camera lucida1 August 2024
In the Drawing Matter collection there is a camera lucida that belonged to Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) (Figs 1–4,6).[1] The camera lucida is an instrument for drawing from life, patented in 1806 by the versatile English chemist and physicist William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828).[2] The term camera lucida (‘well-lit room’) is… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 4
26 July 2024
In the Archive: New and Found 426 July 2024
– Editors
Click on drawings to move. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New On the digital planchest this time is a collection… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
25 July 2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas25 July 2024
– Darell Wayne Fields, Anda French, Tessa Kelly, Paul Lewis and Michael Meredith
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2
22 July 2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 222 July 2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice
15 July 2024
Watchful Solitude: John Hejduk and Venice15 July 2024
The Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (with Waiting House) and House for the Inhabitant Who Refused to Participate were conceived as an urban ensemble and laid the foundation for the later phase of John Hejduk’s work, which he described as an ‘architecture of pessimism’, and encompasses his best-known projects, such as… Read More
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations
11 July 2024
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations11 July 2024
During the 1950s and 1960s, the T-3 research group at the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center produced the first drawings of what is now known as computational fluid dynamics. Using the prowess of early electronic computers—initially developed for the Manhattan Project, the T-3 lab, working under the auspices of the… Read More
Manufacturers Trust Bank
9 July 2024
Manufacturers Trust Bank9 July 2024
When one thinks of Manufacturers Trust Company and New York City architecture, the first image that comes to mind is Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s international style bank building on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street from 1954. By that year, SOM with Gordon Bunshaft as a design partner were the architects… Read More
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-1939
8 July 2024
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-19398 July 2024
When the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was asked to draw up an inventory of interwar buildings that deserved to be placed on the Statutory List, the so-called ‘Pevsner 50’ that resulted was almost entirely composed of the whitest of white modernist buildings. Similarly, John Summerson argued that the only thing… Read More
Sydney’s Infill Facades
5 July 2024
Sydney’s Infill Facades5 July 2024
This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade
28 June 2024
OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade28 June 2024
This is the third post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
27 June 2024
Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas27 June 2024
– Stan Allen, Beatriz Colomina, Michael Meredith, Jesse Reiser and Mark Wigley
The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter
25 June 2024
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter25 June 2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School
6 September 2024
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School6 September 2024
– Editors
The Architecture Summer School took place over five days in mid-August, for the first time hosted in London at Drawing Room in Bermondsey SE1. Now in its eight year, the program is open to any student aged 15 and above who has an ambition to study architecture, with six young… Read More
architectural drawing summer school