Medium: drawing

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023

Timothy Christian Murphy

‘Work with your hands, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.’1 Thess. 4:11-12 All architecture begins with our hands. We make physical what we understand in order to communicate the invisible to the outside world. The translation… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Garage door trio

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Garage door trio

Adrian Dannatt

No sooner had I written about the door hook than my mother, sharp as ever at 98, revealed that the original had been stolen, along with parts of the front gate, presumably for their metal value. This hook was definitely her replacement, from Franchi on the Holloway Road, whilst the first… Read More

Elbe and Marte

Elbe and Marte

Karen Lohrmann and Stefano de Martino

Elbe and Marte is the spatial and ecological adjustment of a 16th-century rural complex and experimental landscape in the Gulf of Naples. Set deep into the coastal hillside, it encompasses a massive work of geo-engineering with rock and stone walls across 30 vertical terraces. It is a survey of time… Read More

Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan

Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan

Francesco Marullo

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. The… Read More

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard: Metamorphoses

Janine Barrier

Jérôme-Charles Bellicard’s drawing, while illustrating one of the poems of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reveals a true picture of the progress of architecture. The transformation of Philemon’s and Baucis’ humble cottage, as required by Jupiter, which unfurls before our very eyes, proclaims that in 1769, the metamorphosis of the primitive hut at… Read More

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Comins x Shatwell Tea House

Various

Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More

Diplomatics and Instrumentality of the Drawing / William Butterfield

Diplomatics and Instrumentality of the Drawing / William Butterfield

Nicholas Olsberg

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More

Quinta da Malagueira

Quinta da Malagueira

Pier Vittorio Aureli

In this short text Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on Quinta da Malagueira housing project in what he sees as a potential convergence between formal principals and political intentions. Quinta da Malagueira is perhaps the last great ‘social housing project’. That is, it is the last great architectural contribution to the… Read More

Alberto Ponis: Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis: Casa Scalesciani

Team SHICHAI拾柴

This is the third of a series of posts pairing films made by team SHICHAI拾柴 with drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. The films, of houses designed by Alberto Ponis on Sardinia, were made for the exhibition ‘Drawing Landscape: Alberto Ponis,’ exhibited at Tongji University, Shanghai, 10 April—20 May 2023. View more… Read More

Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers

Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers

Neil Bingham

Preferring the sterile white look, most British modernist architects shied away from colour, considering it to be the domain of the interior decorator—the ‘woman’s role’. But Patrick Gwynne (1913–2003) always loved to use colour in his designs, with sensitivity and knowledge. As a budding architect in the mid-1930s, Gwynne purchased… Read More

A Gentler Giant

A Gentler Giant

Leif Findlay

Faced with the grand statues of Ramesses II in Abu Simbel, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi wrote ‘We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite, at whose feet so many generations, so many million existences, so… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil

Frank Lloyd Wright: Memorial to the Soil

David G. De Long

The renderings for Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt Memorial to the Soil (1936) show the project’s incorporation of earth berms as a major component of its design. In a sense, the earth itself became architecture. About his design, as inscribed on the pencil drawing above, Wright wrote that the project was… Read More

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

Alberto Cruz

Alberto Cruz presented the principles of The Palace of Dawn and Dusk (Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso) in the Open City’s Music Room on 19 January 1981[1]. While the initial project comprised four lodges with communal rooms, courtyards, and public baths, ultimately, as Cruz describes, following a ‘poetic revelation’… Read More

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Sylvia Lavin

What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

Nicholas Ray

Most of us must sometimes receive a message or a drawing that in retrospect we wish we’d retained—but they go astray. In my own case I can recall three: a note from the philosopher Bernard Williams about his friend Thomas Nagel (lost without record) a postcard from Göran Schildt clarifying our… Read More

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Joseph Bedford

The following text is reproduced from The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), edited by Caroline Voet, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas. The publication is available in print or as an ebook, here. You can find Joseph Bedford on Instagram here. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many architects… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Adrian Dannatt

This is the second part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, and the first text, here. The other sign on the street—blue baked enamel as ur-signifier… Read More

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape

Stan Allen and Marina Correia

‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Team SHICHAI拾柴

This is the first of a series of posts pairing films made by team SHICHAI拾柴 with drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. The films, of houses designed by Alberto Ponis on Sardinia, were made for the exhibition ‘Drawing Landscape: Alberto Ponis,’ exhibited at Tongji University, Shanghai, 10 April—20 May 2023.… Read More

Casa Ugalde Sketch

Casa Ugalde Sketch

Laura Bonell and Daniel Lopez-Doriga

As José Antonio Coderch told it, Mr. Ugalde climbed on the hill, sat in the shadow of a carob tree and looked around him. He then hired Coderch and his partner Manuel Valls with the unique proposal of building a house in the outskirts of Barcelona that could preserve the… Read More

Drawing as Preservation

Drawing as Preservation

Lisa Huang

Jiang Yuan’s ‘Epanggong Illustration’ is a reverie made real by the tip of Yuan’s paintbrush. It is simultaneously a fantasy of a past to which one cannot return, a fascination with a form of existence that has disappeared, and also a set of ideas, which live on in spheres far… Read More

Hardman & Co.

Hardman & Co.

Sarah James

My interest in seeing the Hardman & Co. drawings at Drawing Matter was quite personally motivated as I feel a connection to the company. Partially, because I come from Birmingham where the company was based, and because I visited the studios informally in the 1980s with my parents. I was… Read More

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

‘A free composition of bodies’: the Härlanda Church

Peter Celsing

Peter Celsing won the competition to design the Härlanda Church, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1952, and the church was completed seven years later in 1959. The design of the project is a fragmented list of reflections by the architect in the account reproduced below—which was first drafted on receipts from the… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. First, there were a couple of tense drawings.One, two, three. At the very third second, it quickly escalated to a nonstop dry pastel scratch on A2… Read More