Medium: model

Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here

Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here

Clara Maria Blasius

For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More

The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House

The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House

Nicholas Olsberg

Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More

Heinz Isler Model

Heinz Isler Model

John Chilton and Paul Shepherd

This text was written by Paul Shepherd. The interjections, in italic, are additions by his friend and Heinz Isler expert John Chilton. If you go down to the woods today… Since our son was away on Scout camp all weekend, my plans for Sunday involved a much-needed lie-in and an… Read More

In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář

In the Archive: Petit, Lebas, Fontaine, Le Corbusier and Kolář

Raphael Haque

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. In The Library at Night, Alberto Manguel likens a library to a human brain and… Read More

Power & Public Space 4: Jonas Žukauskas – Forest Parts

Power & Public Space 4: Jonas Žukauskas – Forest Parts

Matthew Blunderfield and Jonas Žukauskas

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: When we think about public space, we tend to consider the street, the plaza, the park or the square – urban spaces… Read More

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Roz Barr

Options Studio was an Elective Module at Cornell University led by Roz Barr. The act of making means engaging with an idea that can be made, unmade, and reconsidered before being realised. Model-making has a critical role in formulating and realising an idea. Materiality and form are developed through discussions… Read More

Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City

Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City

Paul Harrison and John Wood

We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More

Exhibition Design: Charging the Void

Exhibition Design: Charging the Void

Claire Oster

Last year at Cornell University, five students in Alessandra Cianchetta’s design studio Global Artscapes worked on designs for a gallery in the valley at Shatwell. For this, they used photographs and videos in default of a site visit. The brief was for an exhibition space to accommodate the display of… Read More

The Extended Portal: Atcost

The Extended Portal: Atcost

Andrew Clancy

On Shatwell farm, two barns stand side by side. The frames of both are precast concrete portal frames, made by Atcost in line with their standard profile and system which existed at the time. [1] A central line of columns is shared between both barns. Due to differing spans, the… Read More

The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad: The ‘miniature boom’ of mid-century modernism (2021) – Review

The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad: The ‘miniature boom’ of mid-century modernism (2021) – Review

Emma Letizia Jones

The historian and curator Teresa Fankhänel’s latest book and first monograph, The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad: The ‘Miniature Boom’ of Mid-Century Modernism, takes a slightly different tack to the recent spell of research about models that has appeared on the shelves of historians and architects alike. For one, Fankhänel… Read More

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

Helen Thomas

‘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

Working with Tony Fretton

Working with Tony Fretton

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