Medium: photograph

Historic England Image Archive

Historic England Image Archive

Arthur Prior-Palmer

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 Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III

Kester Rattenbury

This is the final of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as a young architect in London and Dorset. As he… Read More

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part II

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part II

Kester Rattenbury

This is the second of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies, that we will publish over the next few weeks; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as… Read More

fala: photography

fala: photography

fala

This is the seventh of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. We photograph the construction site a few times, to keep a certain moment for later. When construction ends, we photograph it again, intensely. Not just… Read More

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I

Kester Rattenbury

This is the first of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies, that we will publish over the next few weeks; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as… Read More

DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth

DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth

Adam Bobbette

What does the inside of the earth sound like? Do continental margins have a signature key? Does magma whistle? These questions preoccupied the scientist Frank Perret in the early 20th century as he sought to develop the new science of volcanology. For Perret, though, listening to the earth was not… Read More

Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília

Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília

Ciro Miguel

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

Superstudio’s Collage Chest: A Chance Machine

Superstudio’s Collage Chest: A Chance Machine

Jonah Ginsburg

In 1968 Adolfo Natalini’s partner, Frances Brunton, returned to Florence from London with their newborn daughter and a small wooden chest with five drawers. On three sides of the chest, Natalini hand painted sky-blue flowers on an orange background. The chest of drawers was then taken to the Superstudio-studio in… Read More

Lenin’s Tomb, the Second Version

Lenin’s Tomb, the Second Version

Niall Hobhouse and Markus Lähteenmäki

The following email exchange took place between Niall Hobhouse, founder of Drawing Matter, and Markus Lähteenmäki in July 2022. Dear Markus, Came across these here in the archive… from god knows where exactly. Thought you might have something to say – had forgotten that it was originally ‘dummied’ in wood.… Read More

Edifice

Edifice

Philippa Lewis

These slides were sent to us by Philippa Lewis in response to Gordon Shrigley’s article on render; photographs to expand on the possibilities of the material, some results purposeful and some incidentally beautiful. Gillian Darley and Philippa Lewis started Edifice in around 1987 – a stock library source for the… Read More

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Matthew Blunderfield and Markus Lähteenmäki

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: Markus Lähteenmäki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia. … Read More

Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)

Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)

Paul Stirton

Although not a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Jan Tschichold was appointed to the selection committee for the Werkbund’s Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo), to be held in Stuttgart between May and June 1929. FiFo was one of the most ambitious attempts to showcase recent developments in photography. The… Read More

Hélène Binet: The Outsider

Hélène Binet: The Outsider

Hélène Binet

a new way of looking at the world Working in my kitchen in the mornings of the 2020 spring.All is silent. Am I silent or is the whole world?In the darkness, you hear better, said Aristotle.In silence and in a closed environment, can you see better? Suddenly the walls of… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia

Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia

Mark Dorrian

This is the final episode in the Pan Scroll Zoom series, edited by Fabrizio Gallanti. It was written in April 2021 and first published in print in Drawing Matter Extracts 3: Pan Scroll Zoom. Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape… Read More

Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. Seeing the Detail

Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. Seeing the Detail

Mikael Bergquist

In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the concept of ‘the Punctum’. The Punctum is something in a photograph that etches itself in the consciousness of the viewer. It is often a small detail that evokes emotions long after the gaze has left the picture: an experience that is born in the viewer’s… 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

Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam

Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam

Michael Young

The following text is a version of chapter three from Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image by Michael Young, published by Routledge © 2021. Available from Routledge. Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay ‘The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse’ published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches… Read More

In the Archive: New and Found 2

In the Archive: New and Found 2

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 Julia Bloomfield recalls a dinner with Frank… 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

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

Sebastiano Brandolini

Alberto Ponis was born in Genoa in 1933. He took his architecture degree in Florence in 1960. His father, Mario Alberto, had founded the M.I.T.A. (Manifattura Italiana Tappeti Artistici) in 1926 in Nervi, near Genoa. The company’s building was built by Luigi Daneri in 1940. Gio Ponti, Arnaldo Pomodoro and… Read More

Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life (2021): Review and Excerpts

Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life (2021): Review and Excerpts

Caroline Voet

The new monograph Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life has arrived, published by ArkDes and Park Books to accompany the exhibition that opened in Stockholm in October 2021 curated by ArkDes director Kieran Long with scenography by Caruso St John Architects (open until August 2022). As an excellent preparation… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance

Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance

Ahmed Belkhodja

Negatives Of the 120,027 items included in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 16,010 are part of the collection called ‘Architecture’, and 22,877 are filed as ‘Negative film’. Astonishingly, only one entry sits in both: ‘Ensemble de 12 négatifs couleur (4 pour le projet Bizan, 6 pour le… Read More

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis

The site chosen by Juan S., an Argentinian with a penchant for Italy, was almost alarmingly steep and sheer above the sea. Even the path leading to it was perilous, and trodden with bated breath. During our long conversations about where the house would be built, we were not so… Read More