Medium: photograph
The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building
04.12.2025
The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 04.12.2025
‘Paris, 1927. I was in Lurçat’s studio on the rue Bonaparte looking for the first time at reproductions of the ‘Health House’ of Neutra. We young followers of the new architecture were both admiring and astounded by this signal of a revolution in building.’ Willy Boesiger, introducing Richard Neutra. Buildings and Projects (Zurich:… Read More
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)
24.11.2025
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)24.11.2025
– Editors
On Friday 7 November, Drawing Matter welcomed architects Tony Fretton and Benjamin Machin to the archive for a conversation to open the exhibition ‘Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important’. Anchored by seven ‘artefacts’ now in the Drawing Matter Collection, the conversation explores the roles of drawings, photography, and sketchbooks… Read More
Protected: Photographing Drawings
03.11.2025
Protected: Photographing Drawings03.11.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
DMJ – From Team 4 to Foster Associates: Condensed Narratives and Expanded Storytelling
30.10.2025
DMJ – From Team 4 to Foster Associates: Condensed Narratives and Expanded Storytelling30.10.2025
The work of Team 4 Architects (1963–1967) and Norman and Wendy Foster’s continuation as Foster Associates (1967–1992) is typically examined through their built projects rather than through their extensive drawing repertoire and its imaginative potential. This article unpacks the narrative strategies employed by the two British practices, focusing on the… Read More
Collection Guide: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati
27.10.2025
Collection Guide: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati27.10.2025
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Francesco Fiammenghi
To probe the long and multifaceted career of Andrea Branzi (1938–2023), one must first turn to his formative years at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence in the early 1960s. At the time, the Florence School became the incubator of several of Italy’s postwar avant-garde groups, including… Read More
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors
23.10.2025
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors23.10.2025
We are thankful to Ross Anderson, who identified these statements Lucien Hervé made when interviewed by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, and which are pertinent to this contact sheet in the Drawing Matter Collection: ‘When Le Corbusier received me in his office one day, we talked for a long time; I remember that he… Read More
Fabric Fabrications
27.08.2025
Fabric Fabrications27.08.2025
Interpretation I am very grateful to Mark Dorrian for his reading of my 1977 drawing. [1] While at the time of its laborious production, the word shroud was not uppermost as my intended coding, I can now see that the dark, drawn folds have a real, symbolic or imaginary resonance—subsequently… Read More
Orgonic Architecture
21.08.2025
Orgonic Architecture21.08.2025
A face is drawn over a torso; breasts are transformed into eyes with nipples as pupils, the nose curves along the edge of the ribcage, and the belly button is the pursed smoking and kissing mouth, above hangs a necklace made of spherical beads, acting like a curled fringe. The… Read More
DMJ – A Storyboard for the Fun Palace
07.07.2025
DMJ – A Storyboard for the Fun Palace07.07.2025
Each community, with its own pride, wit and resourcefulness, could make a toy, a microcosm, a small city, a university-of-the-streets, a street theatre, a science playground, an adventure playground for the young kids – a place for time-wasting, gossip, new-arguing, learning, promenading, dancing, eating and drinking, handling tools, paint, machinery…… Read More
Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência
03.07.2025
Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência03.07.2025
The book Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge is essential reading for anyone interested in Paulo Providência’s renovation of the parish church of São Salvador, Figueredo, 1992-2002, as well as for understanding his singular architectural poetics. A beautifully published suite of drawings (29 pages, including 4 foldouts) and photographs (34 pages) is supported… Read More
Collection Guide: Le Corbusier
26.06.2025
Collection Guide: Le Corbusier26.06.2025
– Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg
Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887-1865) trained in the fine and decorative arts before undertaking travels and varied apprenticeships to develop his architectural skills, opening a studio and teaching practice in La Chaux in 1912, and moving to Paris in 1917 to work principally as a… Read More
Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition
23.06.2025
Trevor Dannatt’s Riyadh Mosque: A Study in Sacred Space and Cultural Juxtaposition23.06.2025
Saudi Arabia’s Quest for Modern Identity and the Urban Transformation of Riyadh Beginning in the 1960s, Saudi Arabia embarked on an ambitious building programme, resulting in numerous architectural projects recognised internationally for their remarkable scale as well as their innovative architectural and engineering solutions.[1] This extensive initiative gained substantial momentum from… Read More
House in Maia
29.05.2025
House in Maia29.05.2025
The transformation of a single-family house built on a plot in the centre of the city of Maia was carried out with consideration to its previous condition as a conceptual motif: an ordinary house, with no qualities of note, detached from the city, spatially uninteresting or even, one might say,… Read More
Collection Guide: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
13.05.2025
Collection Guide: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe13.05.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The drawings archive held by Mies at the time of his death was placed in the Museum of Modern Art, and his correspondence and papers at the Library of Congress. They constitute a comprehensive record of his works after the opening of his practice in the United States, especially for… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery
01.05.2025
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery01.05.2025
Bringing the outside indoors, merging and blurring nature and culture, extending the garden into the study—such notions, a legacy of a generous North American sense of the landscape, from Fallingwater to the Case Study Houses, may have drifted into cliché but still, there is such glory to the actual open… Read More
The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times
27.03.2025
The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times27.03.2025
It’s the sign of a good book about an architect that you want to drop everything and go out to visit, or re-visit, their buildings. And a sure indication of a good book that reproduces many architectural drawings is that you want to be able to pore over the originals… Read More
Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers
24.03.2025
Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers24.03.2025
‘Barely Traced, the true drawing escapes.’[1] On a late night while reading Latife Tekin’s Zamansız (Timeless or Without Time)–a tale of love embedded in a lake, unfolded within the obscured semblances of a weasel and an eel–I found myself moving my lips, whispering: ‘Frii-iii-er-frii-ii-frii’. As I read the words printed on the paper, I… Read More
Collection Guide: Aldo Rossi
20.03.2025
Collection Guide: Aldo Rossi20.03.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams
14.03.2025
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams14.03.2025
‘Only the realization of utopias will make man happy and release him from his frustrations! Use your imagination! Join in… Share the power! Share property.’ Wolf Vostell, Cologne 1969 [1] On June 28, 1969, the four members of the Viennese collective Zünd-Up presented their student project, The Great Vienna Auto-Expander, for Karl… Read More
Broadcasting Norwegian Time
13.03.2025
Broadcasting Norwegian Time13.03.2025
All drawings were done by Nils Holter Office during the NRK project period 1941-47, each made in pencil on paper with the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Drawings from Nils Holter’s archives/Jan Bauck Arkitektkontor. Photographs courtesy of Jørgen Johan Tandberg. In the summer of 2024, and after several… Read More
8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense
24.02.2025
8 Smart’s Place: Making Sense24.02.2025
This text concludes a series of studies by Emily Priest that began at Shatwell Farm during her stay on site in September 2023. How do you organise an architectural archive? Should it be ordered alphabetically? Should it be ordered by date? Should it be ordered by size? Should it be organised by type of object? How do… Read More
This is Tomorrow
02.12.2025
This is Tomorrow 02.12.2025
– Tess McCann
The following text is excerpted from the catalogue of the exhibition Theo Crosby: One Hundred Lives, which is on view at Osh Gallery London until the 11th December 2025. Curated by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and researcher Tess McCann, the exhibition focuses on the life and work of Theo Crosby, one of the founding… Read More
presentation theoretical & imaginary exhibition sketch exhibition design