Medium: model
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt
11 January 2022
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt11 January 2022
‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More
The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression
23 November 2021
The Philips Pavilion: Models as Structural Expression23 November 2021
The following text discusses the use of models as an integral part of the architectural process. It is excerpted from Matthew Mindrup’s article on the roles of models in the design of the Sydney Opera House and Iannis Xenakis and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair (arq:… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects
17 November 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects17 November 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Ilze Wolff and Heinrich Wolff
This is the eighteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Heinrich Wolff and Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects discuss the production of their drawings,… Read More
R for Representation
27 September 2021
R for Representation27 September 2021
When it comes to analysing the status and function of architectural and design models, the concept of representation is central because it underlines the core idea of what these artefacts are: they stand for something else. They are a symbol, a first materialisation, a placeholder for abstract ideas, for constructions… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock
1 September 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock1 September 2021
– Job Floris and Fabrizio Gallanti
This is the seventeenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. Here, Fabrizio interviews Job Floris, co-founder of Mondanock, about their teaching studios at the EFPL and Harvard… Read More
Cosmos Street Revisited
31 August 2021
Cosmos Street Revisited31 August 2021
This response relates to a text by Oscar Binder and Nicholas Podlanha published by Drawing Matter in July 2021, which described and reconstructed (badly) a lost project by the deceased architect James Clark. In fact I am James Clark (decidedly not dead) and the project parodied in this less than… Read More
The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan
5 August 2021
The H-plan: Breuer, Stirling, Gowan5 August 2021
The interesting note by Neil Jackson tying Gowan and his Isle of Wight House to the bi-nuclear plans of Breuer and then to Craig Ellwood’s Hillsborough House, reminds me of Stirling’s own early interest in Breuer, whose Connecticut work he saw during his 1948 internship in New York during his… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao
1 June 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 13: Tatiana Bilbao1 June 2021
– Tatiana Bilbao and Fabrizio Gallanti
This is the thirteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Fabrizio interviews Tatiana Bilbao about her teaching at Yale School of Architecture and… Read More
Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages
12 May 2021
Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages12 May 2021
The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More
Medieval Masons and tracing-floors
10 May 2021
Medieval Masons and tracing-floors10 May 2021
The tracing-floors of York Minster offer a rare glimpse into the relationship between drawing and the Cathedral, the most iconic monument to medieval Gothic. Tucked away into the loft of a small vestibule connecting the North Transept to the Chapter House, the Mason’s Lodge, as it is known, is one… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26 March 2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26 March 2021
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman
22 March 2021
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman22 March 2021
Laid down facing upwards and spread evenly on a neutral surface, 13 tin toys pose for a shot. Cedric Price’s robot collection – battery powered or clockwork, says the caption – includes a mechanical bird and rabbit, several spaceships, spacemen and robots. Their distinctive features intimate specific names, makers and… Read More
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes
1 March 2021
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes1 March 2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage
26 February 2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26 February 2021
Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More
Take One: Architects on Drawing
23 February 2021
Take One: Architects on Drawing23 February 2021
– 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
Zahalternative Histories: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid
19 January 2021
Zahalternative Histories: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid19 January 2021
From a sheet of sketches by Zaha Hadid to rock formations at Ines Meáin and St Brigid’s Well, in this short film John Tuomey explains the thinking behind O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Alternative Histories model. This commentary is the first in a series organised by the Irish Architectural Archive. The series,… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein
18 January 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 6: Emily Wettstein18 January 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti and Emily Wettstein
This is the sixth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Emily Wettstein, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University GSD. The… Read More
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation
8 January 2021
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation8 January 2021
Techniques of architectural drawing have been developed according to the physics of light and our perception of its effects. From the origins of two-dimensional representation – often mythologized in the act of tracing a projected silhouette on a flat surface – to practices of atmospheric simulation in rendering, recognized patterns of light have become essential in the communication of architecture’s spatial… Read More
Startha Éagsula: GKMP architects on Charles Moore
17 December 2020
Startha Éagsula: GKMP architects on Charles Moore17 December 2020
The sketch sections by Charles Moore are dense with ideas. They suggest an intriguing disparity between the exterior form and the interior space, a type of Baroque poché created by a thicket of lines. The structure is tree-like, with trunks and branches shaping the space of the undercroft. Our model… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up
17 December 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Pens down, Braid up17 December 2020
Hair, silky, wavy or coiled, somewhere, is felt by us all. It is one of the first things we play with, we shape and mold, unconsciously or artfully. Beginning as a line, slack and tentative, a hair appears as a strike of fine ink. Collected and carefully teased each strand… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque
16 December 2020
Pan Scroll Zoom 5: Andrés Jaque16 December 2020
– Fabrizio Gallanti and Andrés Jaque
This is the fifth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Andrés Jaque, founder of the Office for Political Innovation… Read More
Startha Éagsula: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid
11 December 2020
Startha Éagsula: O’Donnell + Tuomey on Zaha Hadid11 December 2020
– Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey
Around the time she made this super-skinny scheme for Berlin, Zaha came to Dublin to lecture at the National Gallery. She showed her design for the Taoiseach’s House, breaking out of the walled garden in the Phoenix Park, alongside her breakthrough project for the Hong Kong Peak and other funny… Read More
Working with Tony Fretton
4 January 2022
Working with Tony Fretton4 January 2022
– Jonathan Sergison
In the early 1990s a number of architects, academics and artists came together in a rather fluid manner, meeting regularly in my Bloomsbury apartment. Tony Fretton was older than most of us and had already established a clear critical position. The conversations we had, and sometimes the arguments, were instructive… Read More
competition culture DMC