Medium: drawing

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. Premiered at this year’s La Biennale di Venezia, was Andres Veiel’s documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director known for Olympia (1936) and Triumph des Willens (1935). Framed through archival material Veil’s Riefenstahl (2024) demonstrates how her work was inextricably linked to… Read More

OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative

OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative

Richard Hall

This is the sixth and final post, in the series 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

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

Sayan Skandarajah

There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More

Protected: Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers

Protected: Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers

Gina Morrow

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Drawing Without Erasing

Drawing Without Erasing

Ricardo Flores

The following text first appeared in Drawing without Erasing and Other Essays, by Flores & Prats (Barcelona: Puente editores, 2023), 16-23. Not so long ago, a journalist interviewed us for the British magazine Architecture Today, and the resulting article was called ‘Dirty Drawings’. This suggestive title might bring to mind a… Read More

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Erin McKellar

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

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Streetscapes: Bath

Streetscapes: Bath

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

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 2

Nicholas Olsberg

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

OMA: Collaborators—Allies

Richard Hall

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

2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models

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

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Nicholas Olsberg

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

Notes on Nabokov

Michael Becker

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

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

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

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

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

DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office

Helen Dorey

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

Notes on the 2024 Architecture Summer School

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 programme is open to any student aged 15 and above who has an ambition to study architecture, with six young… Read More

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

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

OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project

Richard Hall

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

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

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

A Missing Drawing

John Evelyn

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

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows

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

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Cara Rachele

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