Medium: photograph
‘Unschärfe’
24.09.2026
‘Unschärfe’24.09.2026
Four sketches and a photograph, scanned together, form a single drawing. Its pencil lines release an energy that condenses, figures, and elaborates without intention for the ruly. Quickly drawn and redrawn, slightly smudged, and enigmatically annotated, the top-left lines dwell on forces of form. Initially layered, subsequently intertwined. To their… Read More
DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier
11.09.2026
DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier 11.09.2026
Derek Boshier’s 16 Situations (1971) could be experienced both in print and as an installation. The exhibition, which toured from early 1971 before being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in September and October 1973, was simple in concept: the viewer followed a wall with 16 altered photographic images, each one with the… Read More
The House Without Character
07.09.2026
The House Without Character07.09.2026
– Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song
Ever since I first encountered Arnulf Rainer’s Overpaintings in an exhibition, I was captivated by them. In 1954, he started to draw with oil crayons over photographs of himself, directly and spontaneously reacting to his own image. They are extremely powerful and honest, revealing a fundamental truth that photography on… Read More
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing
02.09.2026
Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing02.09.2026
– Denise Scott Brown and Ariel Koltun-Fromm
The following interview is excerpted from a longer conversation between Ariel Koltun-Fromm and Denise Scott Brown which took place in April 2024 at her home in Philadelphia. It is part of a larger research project by Ariel investigating drawing as a means of interrogating existing places. * Ariel Koltun-Fromm (AKF):… Read More
Collection Guide: John Ruskin
27.08.2026
Collection Guide: John Ruskin27.08.2026
– Editors
Drawing Matter holds a mineral collection compiled by John Ruskin for the St David’s Boys’ Preparatory School in Reigate, Surrey. The school later relocated to Stone House in Broadstairs and the mineral collection moved with it. Donated in 1883, the specimens were chosen from Ruskin’s personal collection, yet his idea… Read More
Collection Guide: Cedric Price
03.08.2026
Collection Guide: Cedric Price03.08.2026
– Editors
Cedric Price (1934–2003) studied architecture at Cambridge University before receiving his diploma from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1957. He went on to teach at the AA and worked in the offices of Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before founding his own practice in 1960. Though the majority of Price’s… Read More
Unknown Hands
29.06.2026
Unknown Hands29.06.2026
The visual material presented here comes from an early phase of House of Fire, an installation created by Studio Paradigma Ariadné for the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennale—long before the exhibition reached its final form. These images were never intended for display. They were test pieces, fragments, unsuccessful experiments, photocopies of photocopies:… Read More
Blow Up: Dante Bini and His House for a Film Director
25.06.2026
Blow Up: Dante Bini and His House for a Film Director25.06.2026
On July 4th, 1964, in Crespellano on the outskirts of Bologna, Italian architect Dante Bini successfully constructed (in less than three hours) a 12m diameter, 6m high, hemispherical reinforced concrete shell structure using the unique pneumatic formwork of a giant balloon. As a student, Dante Bini had studied and admired… Read More
Protected: Up in the Air: The Heygate and Aylesbury Estates
27.05.2026
Protected: Up in the Air: The Heygate and Aylesbury Estates27.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Vaucher’s Shadows
21.04.2026
Vaucher’s Shadows21.04.2026
It is a curious drawing, one that exudes an almost Magritte-like aroma of the surreal—the kind that depends upon the rendering of a visual-conceptual oxymoron with an extreme degree of realism. The subject has something to do with this, an isolated Ionic capital cut off at the neck from its… Read More
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
Shadows in the work of Canaletto
23.03.2026
Shadows in the work of Canaletto23.03.2026
Canaletto used a camera obscura to trace the architecture of Venice on site.[1] He used the camera sketches in turn to produce finished drawings and paintings. Fig.1 reproduces two pages from Canaletto’s sketchbook, his quaderno, now in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. They show the Campo and Church of SS Giovanni… Read More
André des Gachons: Weather Warning
19.03.2026
André des Gachons: Weather Warning19.03.2026
The recent publication, La Veille du ciel: aquarelles météorologiques (Phénomène éditions), one of the most beautiful books published in 2025, gathers together forty years of daily weather reports by André des Gachons on the skies above the small rural commune of La Chaussée-sur-Marne, in eastern France. Des Gachons remained subjective… Read More
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
And in the shadows, the section fades
13.03.2026
And in the shadows, the section fades13.03.2026
On the black cartridge, a veil of pigments builds up, articulates an edge and fades into the depth. And yet it is the edge that meets me first, together with all the other edges that are layered upon each other. Cascading contrasts of white and black. Or: of brightness and darkness. Now… Read More
John Hejduk, Object/Subject Riga
13.02.2026
John Hejduk, Object/Subject Riga13.02.2026
I began photographing John Hejduk’s work at the beginning of my interest in photography, when I knew little about his work and about architecture in general. Yet photographing John Hejduk came to me in a very natural way. His work, being so unique, had no visual references, and that gave… Read More
Architecture that Does not Perform
02.02.2026
Architecture that Does not Perform02.02.2026
A trip with our studio EBBA to Cambridge for our Christmas party resurfaced a familiar feeling. Moving through the city with its colleges, courts, libraries and streets, it became apparent how often architects expect things to perform. Buildings are read for what they signify, how clearly they express an idea… Read More
Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Photography
30.01.2026
Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary: Photography30.01.2026
The following text is one of the entries included in the recently published book Provenance in Architecture, A Dictionary (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2025) edited by Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending. The book, presented in the form of a dictionary, examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts, from acquisition to… Read More
Photographing Drawings
27.01.2026
Photographing Drawings27.01.2026
At Drawing Matter, we have a rule that when a new object enters the collection, it must be photographed and published within a month. With our capable photographer and her fancy equipment still in Somerset, we needed to find other ways of documenting new additions to the collection. We tried… Read More
Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos
23.01.2026
Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos23.01.2026
On 7th July 2025, an exhibition dedicated to architect Heinrich Kulka opened at the Ringturm Exhibition Centre in Vienna, titled Heinrich Kulka (1900–1971) – The Spatial Plan as a Design Method, focusing on Kulka’s European work, both with Adolf Loos and as an independent architect. It was curated by architect and writer… Read More
Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer
05.01.2026
Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer05.01.2026
Here, Mark Dorrian examines the theoretical history of the shadow and its evolving role in architectural drawing. The text acts as a word-and-image primer for the third colloquium event, jointly hosted by the RIBA and V&A Drawings Collections, and Drawing Matter, which will take place later this month—a day of… Read More
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid
15.12.2025
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid15.12.2025
– Editors
Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. After studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1968 to 1971, she moved to London in 1972, where she studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA). It was here that her work began to reference the Russian avant-garde,… Read More
Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery
02.10.2026
Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery02.10.2026
– Luis Callejas and Julia Spackman
The following conversation has been adapted from a longer interview first published in Pairs 5, now including drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. * Julia Spackman (JS): This collection of snapshots by Katie Ladd of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery is a striking departure from its typical depiction.[1] For one, the… Read More
landscape photograph presentation