Medium: drawing

DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation

DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation

Peter Carl

The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’.… Read More

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Torrentius, or The Visage of Time

Pierre Chabard

Tête-à-tête Charles Vandenhove’s transformation of the Hôtel Torrentius in Liège’s Rue Saint-Pierre between 1977 and 1981 marked a crucial point in the trajectory of both the building and the architect. When, in November 1977, Vandenhove purchased the mansion to set up his architectural practice and city home, the building was… Read More

On Axonometric Drawing

On Axonometric Drawing

Martino Tattara

In the work of our practice, since the very start, we have placed a great deal of attention towards drawing and representation. The recent exhibition in Antwerp—The Urban Villa—is a good example of our work, which is based on the combination of design with research; both of these two activities… Read More

Drawing on Ideas

Drawing on Ideas

Stan Allen

In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Laura Harty

‘He pulls down, he builds up, he exchanges square for round.‘Horace—Epistles. I. 1. 100[1] The Aldo van Eyck drawing currently on show at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields appears, at first glance, to do precisely this. A preliminary drawing, one made for the design of the architect’s own house, on transparent… Read More

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Ralf Bock

In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More

Eisenman on Rossi

Eisenman on Rossi

Peter Eisenman

Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping… Read More

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Erin McKellar

Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… Read More

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman

This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More

Lisson 1 + 2

Lisson 1 + 2

Tony Fretton

LISSON GALLERY 1, 1986. Bell Street, London NW1 Tony Fretton, Michael Fieldman, Ruth Aureole Stuart. We were invited to discuss a new building for the Lisson Gallery. Meetings took place in the office of their existing premises, that the Director and his colleagues shared. To reach it you walked in… Read More

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Luis Callejas

This text is loosely based on the first part of my lecture ‘The Landscape Model,’ delivered at the Sverre Fehn-designed Hedmark Museum in October 2023. The lecture was part of the Sverre Fehn Symposium ‘Authoring Architecture in Time’ organised by AHO and the Hedmark Museum, and curated by Professor Mari… Read More

Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More

Anton Markus Pasing

Anton Markus Pasing

Peter Wilson

Münster, March 2024 Mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am. Nearly fifty years ago Nigel Coates writing in my Villa Auto AA exhibition catalogue chose the above quote from Roland Barthes to describe my pathological production of architectural fictions. These were hand-drawn, a… Read More

Paul Rudolph: Transcending the Conventions of Architectural Drawing 

Paul Rudolph: Transcending the Conventions of Architectural Drawing 

Timothy M. Rohan

Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) is known for his compelling large-scale presentation drawings, such as the memorable perspective sections of his Yale Art & Architecture Building in New Haven, CT (1958-1963), among others. But a deeper dig into the Rudolph archive at the United States Library of Congress in Washington D.C. reveals… Read More

Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration

Dogma: Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration

James Payne

On the north edge of Brussels city centre, the recently refurbished Gare Maritime was once Europe’s largest goods station. Located in the former industrial area known as ‘Tour & Taxis’, the vast nineteenth-century roof now shelters offices, indoor retail boulevards and enough left over space to host markets and events,… Read More

For AP + AR

For AP + AR

Kirsty Badenoch

Long, thin and crisp, sun-bleached, rose-blushed. Thousand-time photocopied notations of notations. Struck-through with highlighter, corrected and recorrected re-negotiated, scribbled and walked across. I walk together with AP e AR, our thin nibbed-shoes picking careful tracks between sharpie chasms. We leak behind us inky trails, to be washed away by the… Read More

The Utzons go to Stockholm

The Utzons go to Stockholm

Jørn Utzon

‘…my parents went to visit the grand exhibition in Stockholm in 1930. Here the Scandinavian functionalism had its breakthrough in a society of exceedingly ornate style. Here [in Stockholm] they were exposed to a new and simple, white architecture that drew in light and air, one that let in the… Read More

E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West

E. W. Godwin and the Mild Mild West

Matt Page

From this drawing it would seem unlikely that the side elevation at its centre would one day be photographed thousands of times and attract the interest of people from all over the world. It appears unremarkable, especially when compared to the gutsy brick detailing and gothic flourishes of the building’s… Read More

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Cammy Brothers

Dear Niall, Before I forget, I wanted to send you the transcription from the Montano sheet. You can post it as my little discovery. Non dir di me se su di me non sai senza di te che poi di me dirai?Non fare ad aloro quello che a te non piace … Read More

Brunel’s Camera Lucida: A Closer Look

Brunel’s Camera Lucida: A Closer Look

Pablo Garcia

A camera lucida is a 19th-century drawing aid. When you look into the eyepiece, you see a ghost image of your subject overlaid onto your paper. Since you can see your hand holding your pencil with your subject superimposed, you can trace directly from real life. Invented in 1807, before… Read More

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Matt Page

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was born in Nassau, Bahamas, and educated in Scotland from the age of six. He briefly studied at the Glasgow School of Art and joined the British Army in 1942. After the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd while producing paintings, short plays and stories. He… Read More

Drawing as Travelogue

Drawing as Travelogue

Beth George and Emerald Wise

This is a rumination on memory, perceived worlds, and on drawing as embodied experience and shared conversation. While visiting Drawing Matter, we attended to and later remembered spaces both drawn and physical. Produced on the floor of a roof terrace in Sicily, we moved over the drawn field as a… Read More

Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Two Lectures at Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman

The following text is a brief reflection on two lectures delivered at Shatwell Farm in August 2024 as part of the ENAC EPFL Drawing Research Platform. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read an account of the week, click here. The two lectures at… Read More

Léo Perrin and Polina Holub

Léo Perrin and Polina Holub

Measuring Shatwell’s tempo Using threads of strings, our own bodies In this repetitive measured dance, profiles arise The more practice, the more accurate the hands get Four of them follow the same choreography Surveying piano piano the sheet Some be good, others not, only the paper knows The harvest of… Read More