Medium: drawing
Gowan on the English House
01.04.2020
Gowan on the English House01.04.2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30.03.2020
Houses of Work and Play30.03.2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art
27.03.2020
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art27.03.2020
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25.03.2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25.03.2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
Behind the Walls
23.03.2020
Behind the Walls23.03.2020
Albert, an artist known only by his first name, thinks about buildings in ways similar to an architect. As he draws, he imagines the structures on the page having a future life in bricks and mortar, considering as he does so whether the audience for his drawings will ask themselves,… Read More
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built
20.03.2020
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built20.03.2020
There are several curiosities in the plan of this classic modernist house by Richard Neutra. First, more area is allowed for dogs than for music. Second, there is a two-car garage, but a separate parking-space for a Rolls-Royce. Here is fine discrimination. But fine discrimination is exactly what you would… Read More
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)
09.03.2020
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)09.03.2020
Alvar Aalto, from an interview for the Swedish newspaper Åbo Underrättelser, May 22, 1930. Reprinted in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: Sketches, trans. Stuart Wrede (London: MIT Press, 1979), 16.
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building
06.03.2020
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building06.03.2020
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
05.03.2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)05.03.2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Summerson: The Little House
04.03.2020
Summerson: The Little House04.03.2020
– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold
03.03.2020
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold03.03.2020
– Biba Dow
Giorgio Morandi’s work focused on studying again and again a small group of domestic objects – vases, jugs, bottles – in his home in Bologna. During his adult life, he produced a large quantity of paintings and etchings which together build up a shimmering representation of his field of focus.… Read More
Seeing, and Disbelieving
02.03.2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving02.03.2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan
01.03.2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan01.03.2020
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More
Next Year in Yemen
09.02.2020
Next Year in Yemen09.02.2020
‘Next year, there will be a civil war in Yemen. Please lend me the money so I can go now,’ I had the wit to ask my parents. It was after my first year in architecture school, not knowing that this journey would come to define me as an architect.… Read More
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library
07.02.2020
Take One: Colin St John Wilson, MJ Long and Eric Parry on the British Library07.02.2020
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer
06.02.2020
Tony Fretton: Drawn Closer06.02.2020
– Tony Fretton and Sarah Handelman
Sometimes you make drawings to tell yourself the project is going okay. Well, that’s what I do. This drawing came quite late in the design of the first Lisson Gallery. In the way I used to work, you would reach a point where you’d have a very thorough sense of… Read More
La Casa Della Falsita
05.02.2020
La Casa Della Falsita05.02.2020
The 1982 ‘Casa Della Falsita’ exhibition was decidedly under the English architectural radar. Held in Munich at the Focus Furniture Gallery, the inspiration for the show was the result of a squabble with municipality, after the shop owner, Peter Pfeiffer, was denied planning permission to build a spiral staircase between… Read More
Behind the Lines 14
03.02.2020
Behind the Lines 1403.02.2020
These are just insignificant sketches, but they remind me of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques in 1937; by night it was a unique experience – mémorable. You see, one theme of the exposition was light and water: an expression of what could be achieved with the power of modern electricity,… Read More
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament
29.01.2020
Basil Spence: Houses of Parliament29.01.2020
Sketch made by Sir Basil Spence at a meeting of the Royal Fine Art Commission in January 1969 to illustrate a scheme for enlarging the accommodation of MPs in the Houses of Parliament made by his assistant Christopher Libby.
Battersea Redevelopment
22.01.2020
Battersea Redevelopment22.01.2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
A Chevrolet Truck
20.01.2020
A Chevrolet Truck20.01.2020
It was the architect Philip Johnson who first compared cars to statuary. In the ‘Eight Automobiles’ show he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, he coined the expression ‘rolling sculpture’. Johnson was good at coinages: two decades before he had given us ‘the International Style’ to describe… Read More
Espelho Álvaro
15.01.2020
Espelho Álvaro15.01.2020
This mirror was among the objects, sketches and photographs at his great exhibition at Padiglione di Arte Contemporanea. Siza was in a corner of the hall with some friends. More than a thousand guests from the Milano-bene (well-to-do Milanese) had come for a vernissage with fur coats, television spotlights, beautiful women, men… Read More
Retail Therapy
30.03.2020
Retail Therapy30.03.2020
– A. Trystan Edwards
In architectural design the size of the human unit must always be borne in mind. It is nowhere more necessary to observe this maxim than in the determination of the scale of shop fronts, for here not only is the tendency to an undue magnification of parts most strongly encouraged… Read More
elevation presentation commerce DMC