Medium: photograph
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter
25 June 2024
Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter25 June 2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More
On the Street
14 June 2024
On the Street14 June 2024
The Drawing Matter editors have been enjoying Eddie Heathcote’s On the Street: In-Between Architecture and wanted to share the following short extracts. Draining Against the wall under the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome is a strange object, looking a little like a pancake with… Read More
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation
8 May 2024
DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation8 May 2024
Architecture is a promiscuous practice that touches and learns from many other disciplines. Architects have associated their studies with other specialisations in the sciences, arts and humanities and many of the aspects of architectural education draw upon and defer to those realms. To make architecture one needs to gather ideas… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 3
3 May 2024
In the Archive: New and Found 33 May 2024
– Editors
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New There was excitement when Enzo Mari’s resin… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture
29 April 2024
Sugimoto and Architecture29 April 2024
The early twentieth century saw a multifaceted blossoming of the avant-garde in Europe, with Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl… These movements also had an influence on architecture. Until the nineteenth century, people’s way of living was centred around religion. Much architectural decoration was developed in order to express the magnificence… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff
29 April 2024
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff29 April 2024
– 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
17 April 2024
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim17 April 2024
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
12 April 2024
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings12 April 2024
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
8 April 2024
Shatwell Farm: Appendages8 April 2024
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
3 April 2024
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door3 April 2024
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
13 March 2024
DMJ – Template and Talisman13 March 2024
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
11 March 2024
Shatwell Farm: Sheds and Silos11 March 2024
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
19 February 2024
Shatwell Farm: Cars19 February 2024
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
7 February 2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design7 February 2024
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
31 January 2024
Careful Crudeness31 January 2024
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
19 January 2024
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras19 January 2024
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
12 January 2024
Return to the Archive12 January 2024
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
Remembering Architecture
18 October 2023
Remembering Architecture18 October 2023
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
6 September 2023
Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 6 September 2023
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’
1 September 2023
Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’1 September 2023
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
28 August 2023
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Hook & Extension28 August 2023
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
18 August 2023
DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey18 August 2023
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
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture
1 May 2024
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture1 May 2024
– Holger Kleine
This article first appeared in German: ‘Der gut gebaute Witz’ in Der Architekt 4/21 ‘Effekt und Affekt, Psychologie in der Architektur’ (2021), 60-63. 18 September 2021 Kurt W. Forster writing to Holger Kleine (translated from German) ‘… reading your essay on Paul Rudolph’s Hastings Hall. A fabulous piece, itself a kind of… Read More
theatre interior ornament