Medium: drawing

Malagueira: Conflict Resolution (1983)

Malagueira: Conflict Resolution (1983)

Álvaro Siza

From my experience at Évora, I believe that participation – neither mystifying nor mystified – implies numerous and inevitable conflicts, conflicts which come out of the project. The general concept for the Malagueira district, the methods, the project itself, have indeed given rise to contradictory commentaries, even before our intervention:… Read More

Shower at Shatwell Farm

Shower at Shatwell Farm

Adam Blencowe

Being a designer and adherent of adhocism – speed, economy, improvisation and learning-as-you-go – the materials I use have a strong influence on the outcome of my work. This completely dovetailed with Niall’s brief: to design and build an outdoor toilet and shower for occasional scholars occupying the library at… Read More

Startha Éagsula: GKMP architects on Charles Moore

Startha Éagsula: GKMP architects on Charles Moore

GKMP architects

The sketch sections by Charles Moore are dense with ideas. They suggest an intriguing disparity between the exterior form and the interior space, a type of Baroque poché created by a thicket of lines. The structure is tree-like, with trunks and branches shaping the space of the undercroft. Our model… Read More

Soane’s Temple Stye

Soane’s Temple Stye

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

A temple for pigs? for swine? for hogs? Not a temple to worship them in, nor a temple for them to be sacrificed in. A temple for them to live in. These are not the pigs which invented their own form of latin, or those powerful Orwellian pigs, but normal… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque

Fabrizio Gallanti and Andrés Jaque

This is the fifth 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 Andrés Jaque, founder of the Office for Political Innovation… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Writing Prize 2020: The Anatomy of an Oyster Theatre

Emilie Banville

In the beginning, there was only a shell. An empty shell. But we could already sense the contours of its elliptical shape, its multilayered protective envelope, stratified, laminated, like the bark of a tree (a). Slowly, the outer flaps of the carapace would move away from each other, vertically sweeping… Read More

Startha Éagsula: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid

Startha Éagsula: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid

Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey

Around the time she made this super-skinny scheme for Berlin, Zaha came to Dublin to lecture at the National Gallery. She showed her design for the Taoiseach’s House, breaking out of the walled garden in the Phoenix Park, alongside her breakthrough project for the Hong Kong Peak and other funny… Read More

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Drawing, Collaging, Rendering

Cameron Lintott

When the ‘hard-line drawing’ has become so synonymous with the image of the architect it is easy to forget that the convenience of the everyday pen is relatively recent. For most of the long history of the world’s second-oldest profession, pen, paint and ink were reserved for competition boards or… Read More

Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints

Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints

Paul Emmons

An intriguing Italian Renaissance drawing from the mid-sixteenth century has recently received critical attention through Drawing Matter. [1] Both the recto and the verso of the paper sheet have an ancient temple plan in perspective in a landscape setting, drawn in brown ink and attributed to the Sangallo circle as… Read More

Startha Éagsula: t o b Architect on James Gowan

Startha Éagsula: t o b Architect on James Gowan

Thomas O’Brien

There is a ramp;There is a staggering of volumes in plan and section, in out, in out;There is a tapering toward the top;The emphasis is on the public ambulatory spaces;There are people ambulating about;The proportion and judgement of the volumes appear to be empathetic to people;The undercroft condition is important… Read More

Collection of Sections

Collection of Sections

Allen Keith Yee

The following drawings and commentaries have been excerpted from Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections (Oro Editions, 2020). The publication surveys the use of section drawings in the histories of architecture and other professions, from the 17th century to the present. More information on the book can be found here.… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: Smudgy Logic – A Short Story

Writing Prize 2020: Smudgy Logic – A Short Story

Aris Kafantaris

‘it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.’– Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation ‘so you compute with smudgy pictures?’– K-32, Universal Fabricator ‘But what does it do?’ insisted Kei in his eerily smooth, synthetic voice. ‘Are you really asking me what my drawing does?’ Miho’s… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Paul Dillon Architects on Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

Startha Éagsula: Paul Dillon Architects on Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

Paul Dillon

This drawing is a development sketch for their proposed part in the rebuilding of the last remaining shanty town outside of Seoul, South Korea. It remains unbuilt. The model is instructional, suggestive of a final building, uses found, recycled materials. The use is not specified. The process of building is… Read More

William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’

William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’

Laura Freeman

On 22 March 1921, The Times reported on ‘the urgent need of a green belt being preserved round London.’ It was the first recorded use of the phrase. By the time William Heath Robinson came to makes sketches for ‘Tightening the Green Belt’ (c.1935–47), the urban ring o’ roses was familiar enough… Read More

Aldo Rossi: The First Sketch and the Final Drawing

Aldo Rossi: The First Sketch and the Final Drawing

Andrea Leonardi

The following letter was sent to the Drawing Matter editors by Andrea Leonardi, a member of Rossi’s office for nine years.   A few days ago my dear friend Maurizio Diton, sent me an article he wrote for you in October 2019, ‘The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working… Read More

Drawing is discovery (1953)

Drawing is discovery (1953)

John Berger

For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together… Read More

Outside In

Outside In

Emily Priest

Music plays from behind a curtain. Lights come on and you see that the curtain runs along two sides of a carpet whose centre hosts a leopard skin cushion. There is a chair at one side of the carpet and at the opposite end, a single column. Not before long… Read More

Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin

Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin

David Leech

The colourful ink and pencil drawing of Barthélemy Enfantin seeks to establish a set of rules for a new open metropolis. Without site, set out in all axes, and with the edges of the drawing alluding to a non-determined repetition, it was possibly drawn for continuous reuse and translation. Like… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Fabrizio Gallanti and Mauricio Pezo

This is the fourth 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 Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von… Read More

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric

Stan Allen

One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More

Bramante: Five Dots

Bramante: Five Dots

Guido Beltramini

The remote past is distant and faded. Original objects and documents that might be used to study it are scarce. They are often uncooperative and most of the time they don’t tell the truth, because they have been reframed by history’s ‘victors’ over the centuries. We must always bear in… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing

Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing

Marko Skoblar

Similar to many of Rossi’s drawings, the Urban Fragment presents us with a collection of his most cherished forms – a primordial tower, the hand of a saint, and fragments of his own projects, such as the Gallaratese 2 housing complex in Milan and the Cemetery of San Cataldo. In… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Steve Larkin

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. Friedrich… Read More

All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture

All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture

Richard Emerson

In Louis de Boulogne’s drawing, now in the Drawing Matter collection, Architecture appears as a young woman. She sits leaning on an altar with a Corinthian capital at her feet, compasses in one hand and a portrait of Vignola in the other. Behind her are the ruins of Rome.  It… Read More