Medium: drawing
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood
14 October 2024
Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood14 October 2024
At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3
10 October 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 310 October 2024
This post concludes Nicholas Olsberg’s series on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, the text of which is included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Sounding corridors’: entry and sequence The driveway brings us into a… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2
3 October 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 23 October 2024
This post continues with the second part of Nicholas Olsberg’s text on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Cycles of the human tale’: the library The elevation of the… Read More
OMA: Collaborators—Allies
30 September 2024
OMA: Collaborators—Allies30 September 2024
This is the fifth 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
2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models
27 September 2024
2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models27 September 2024
– Jesper Authen and Matt Page
Drawing is the act of translating a thought to a mark on the page—where the hand is in conversation with the mind. This conversation is marked by an unbridgeable gap between the idea and the output—sometimes betraying and exposing the thought, and other times surprising you with an unintended vigour… Read More
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1
23 September 2024
Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 123 September 2024
William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More
Notes on Nabokov
19 September 2024
Notes on Nabokov19 September 2024
Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s
16 September 2024
A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s16 September 2024
– Editors and John Summerson
In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter
12 September 2024
Claude Parent at Drawing Matter12 September 2024
– Editors and Chloé Parent
Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… Read More
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
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School
6 September 2024
Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School6 September 2024
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
Streetscapes: Bath
7 October 2024
Streetscapes: Bath7 October 2024
– Ptolemy Dean
The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More
urban form sketch record