Medium: photograph

Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

This interview is excerpted from the catalogue of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which was on show at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October 2023 – 07 January 2024, and is touring to UCCA Beijing and MCA Australia. Copies of the catalogue can be purchased here. Ralph Rugoff: Hiroshi Sugimoto has… Read More

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings

Gareth Griffiths

On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Appendages

Shatwell Farm: Appendages

Emily Priest

This text is the third in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. We regularly speak of reusing and refurbishing at the scale of a building but talk less about small gestures of fixing and repair. As secondary or even… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door

Adrian Dannatt

This is the sixth part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, here. Entering the house the first thing one sees is the entrance door to my… Read More

DMJ – Template and Talisman

DMJ – Template and Talisman

Laura Harty

For a time, Aldo Van Eyck kept this little amulet in his pocket. An alabaster disc, inlaid with mother of pearl and jet, 30mm in diameter, it is coin-sized, weighted against and warmed by the heat of the body, passing though the fingers. Its uses are both symbolic and instrumental.… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Sheds and Silos

Shatwell Farm: Sheds and Silos

Emily Priest

This text is the second in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. Shatwell sits on dusty yellow Bridport sand encircled by limestone. Most of the farm’s ground is flat, except for its western edge, which creeps up… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Cars

Shatwell Farm: Cars

Emily Priest

This text is the first in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September last year. I first came to Shatwell Farm on a wintery November morning in 2022 to see the drawing archive with some friends. On arrival, Niall recommended… Read More

Architectural Covers: A Site of Design

Architectural Covers: A Site of Design

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Between 1971 and 1973,… Read More

Careful Crudeness

Careful Crudeness

Karen Olesen

At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

Ahmed Belkhodja

Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More

Return to the Archive

Return to the Archive

Hans-Dieter Nägelke

In the mellow warmth of September 2023, I, in my capacity as the Director of the Museum of Architecture at the Technical University Berlin, found myself in the unpretentious village of Mikoszewo, Poland. There, where the Vistula River gracefully concludes its journey into the arms of the sea, I stood,… Read More

Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon

Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at Waddesdon

Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild

The following extract, a personal account by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, describes the imaginary and real processes of constructing and maintaining a country home, from the ground up, in late-19th-century England. Written for the Red Book in 1897, a family album of sorts, it is one of the key sources… Read More

Remembering Architecture

Remembering Architecture

Fraser Stables

This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 

Matt Page

Fraser Stables speaks quietly through his series Remembering Architecture. There is a staid documentarian quality to his photographs, but not that of architectural photography. When architectural details—the meeting of nature and architecture, light falling on surfaces—are made the focus, the images speak more to a sensitive process of recording moments; and in many… Read More

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown

The following text is an excerpt from Denise Scott Brown’s 2018 Soane Medal lecture, written by Thomas Weaver, and developed out of a series of conversations between Denise Scott Brown and Thomas Weaver in July 2018. I have never thought of myself as a photographer, only an architect and urbanist,… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Hook & Extension

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Hook & Extension

Adrian Dannatt

Liza Fior, whose phone was used to take these snaps (I still refuse the portable-telephone obligation), was particularly taken by this hook for the garage door, the way it hangs, the perhaps deliberate chipping into the stone, ‘I am sure he planned it’. That minute attention to the smallest thing,… Read More

DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey

DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey

Emma Letizia Jones

In 1868, the little-known project manager and government surveyor Albrecht Meydenbauer (1834 – 1921) climbed to the top of the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin to shoot the first 360-degree photographic record of the city. In contrast to the idealistic, hyper-real clarity of a more famous painted panorama of Berlin made… Read More

Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review

Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022) – Review

Mark Pimlott

Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect is a welcome and necessary publication. Its overview of the ideas and career of Denise Scott Brown establishes the rich foundations of her work in education, urban planning, and architecture, as informed by her attentions to the city as it… Read More

Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture

Sant’Elia and Global Futurist Architecture

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

‘Found’ in the archive at Drawing Matter, this wild text by Marinetti on his friend and collaborator Sant’Elia seems not to have been previously translated. Its occasion was a commemorative exhibition of the young architect’s work organized in 1930 by the commune of his native city, Como, fourteen years after… Read More

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

The Palace of Dawn and Dusk / Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso

Alberto Cruz

Alberto Cruz presented the principles of The Palace of Dawn and Dusk (Palacio del Alba y del Ocaso) in the Open City’s Music Room on 19 January 1981[1]. While the initial project comprised four lodges with communal rooms, courtyards, and public baths, ultimately, as Cruz describes, following a ‘poetic revelation’… Read More

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

A Christmas Card from Ralph Erskine

Nicholas Ray

Most of us must sometimes receive a message or a drawing that in retrospect we wish we’d retained—but they go astray. In my own case I can recall three: a note from the philosopher Bernard Williams about his friend Thomas Nagel (lost without record) a postcard from Göran Schildt clarifying our… Read More

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Joseph Bedford

The following text is reproduced from The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), edited by Caroline Voet, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas. The publication is available in print or as an ebook, here. You can find Joseph Bedford on Instagram here. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many architects… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — House Number & Gate

Adrian Dannatt

This is the second part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, and the first text, here. The other sign on the street—blue baked enamel as ur-signifier… Read More