Medium: drawing
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines
14.11.2023
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines14.11.2023
I first encountered Heinz Isler’s thin reinforced concrete shells when I saw his presentation ‘Third Decade of Structural Shells’ at the thirtieth anniversary symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), in Madrid, in September 1989. This was the first time I saw his inspirational drawing ‘Natural Hills on… Read More
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers
09.11.2023
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers09.11.2023
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove
09.11.2023
The Manufacture of Architecture: Joseph Paxton and the Development of the Great Stove09.11.2023
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. Joseph… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop
01.11.2023
Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop01.11.2023
– Alberto Johnsson, Arthur Masure, Daniel Nitsche, Toby Pullen and Alexander Turner
During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of… Read More
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany
27.10.2023
Keep Digging and You Will Find What You Are Looking For: Alvar Aalto in Germany27.10.2023
In 1957, Alvar Aalto gave a speech in Munich entitled ‘Schöner Wohnen’.[1] He referred to his own design, the Hansaviertel apartment block in Berlin—his first project in Germany—as he described the key concerns in the design of the modern dwelling. (The construction of Aalto’s second German project, the Neue Vahr… Read More
Repton does a Bernini – A Crescent for The Ham
24.10.2023
Repton does a Bernini – A Crescent for The Ham24.10.2023
Ever since 1743, when John Wood failed to get backers for his vast Royal Forum, the area to the south of South Parade has been treated like the campus of a nondescript university. The chequered gardens of Abbey Orchard have been supplanted by Manvers Street car park, while to the… Read More
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once
20.10.2023
Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once20.10.2023
In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities
10.10.2023
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities10.10.2023
Judit Reigl was ninety-two years old in 2015 when she started Dance of Death, her transcendent series of small-scale vanitas drawings. Having reached a stage where she could barely see her own pencil marks, Reigl found skulls to be a ready subject. She said she had drawn many skulls in… Read More
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album
06.10.2023
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album06.10.2023
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
François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’
05.10.2023
François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’05.10.2023
François Cointeraux was born in Lyon in 1740 and was introduced to agriculture and construction at an early age through his family’s business ventures. When his uncle designated him the ‘universal heir’ of his company, Cointeraux inherited several buildings in Lyon and around 24 houses in the area. His marriage… Read More
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective
02.10.2023
DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective02.10.2023
This essay discusses three enigmatic one-point perspective drawings. The first was made by the precocious Prussian architect and teacher Friedrich Gilly, the second by Alberto Sartoris as a young student of architecture in Geneva, and the third by the relatively unknown modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. These drawings have been… Read More
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review
29.09.2023
Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review29.09.2023
Paul Goesch was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital and, in 1940, murdered by the Nazis. Looking at these intense, yet often playful and exuberant drawings, it is impossible to forget the stark facts of his life. Which is unfortunate, because an exclusive attention to his personal history imposes a… Read More
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman
28.09.2023
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman28.09.2023
Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More
Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 2023
21.09.2023
Work with your hands: AUB Summer School 202321.09.2023
‘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
18.09.2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Garage door trio18.09.2023
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
13.09.2023
Elbe and Marte13.09.2023
– 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
12.09.2023
Architecture and Real Abstraction: Adler & Sullivan12.09.2023
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
Comins x Shatwell Tea House
25.08.2023
Comins x Shatwell Tea House25.08.2023
– 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
21.08.2023
Diplomatics and Instrumentality of the Drawing / William Butterfield21.08.2023
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
11.08.2023
Quinta da Malagueira11.08.2023
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
09.08.2023
Alberto Ponis: Casa Scalesciani09.08.2023
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
07.08.2023
Patrick Gwynne: Colour by Numbers07.08.2023
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
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing
13.10.2023
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing13.10.2023
– Bahar Avanoğlu
The following notes reflect on a first year teaching studio led by Bahar Avanoğlu at Istanbul Bilgi University. The studio took Niall McLaughlin’s Alternative Histories model, an interpretation of a sketch by Basil Spence for extending the Houses of Parliament in London, as a starting point to continue a chain… Read More
sketch projection (axonometric isometric) Teaching (project) DMC