Medium: print

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More

Protected: Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Protected: Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Reyner Banham

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Drawing on Ideas

Drawing on Ideas

Stan Allen

In 1972, when Peter Eisenman’s House II was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, the editors confused a photograph of the built work for an image of a model. The house was located in Southern Vermont, and had been shot from a low angle against a uniform grey sky with a snow-covered hillside… Read More

Protected: Haunted Venice

Protected: Haunted Venice

Mark West

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper

Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper

Niall Hobhouse

The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend… Read More

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Matt Page

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) was born in Nassau, Bahamas, and educated in Scotland from the age of six. He briefly studied at the Glasgow School of Art and joined the British Army in 1942. After the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd while producing paintings, short plays and stories. He… Read More

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Structures and Sequences of Spaces

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Structures and Sequences of Spaces

Marco Vanucci

Marco Vanucci and Drawing Matter revisit three seminal texts of Luigi Moretti, not generally available in translation. Christopher Huw Evans has translated the three texts for Drawing Matter.  The first post presented Luigi Moretti’s article ‘Eclecticism and Unity of Language’ (published in the first issue of Spazio), and the second post featured Moretti’s… Read More

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Erin McKellar

At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Abstract Forms of Baroque Sculpture

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Abstract Forms of Baroque Sculpture

Marco Vanucci

Marco Vanucci and Drawing Matter revisit three seminal texts of Luigi Moretti, not generally available in translation. Christopher Huw Evans has translated the three texts for Drawing Matter.  The first post presented Luigi Moretti’s opening article ‘Eclecticism and Unity of Language’ that was published in the first issue of Spazio. This second post presents… Read More

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Editors and Chloé Parent

Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… Read More

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

Wolkenbügel: El Lissitzky as Architect

Richard Anderson and Markus Lähteenmäki

It was in a room without windows and walls of bare concrete, in the basement of one of the ETH buildings on its suburban campus in Hönggerberg Zürich, where I first heard about this book project from its author. Not another book on El Lissitzky, I remember thinking, when he… Read More

OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project

OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project

Richard Hall

This is the fourth post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Eclecticism and Unity of Language

Luigi Moretti and Spazio: Eclecticism and Unity of Language

Marco Vanucci

In the newfound spirit that emerged at the end of the Second World War, Rome became the epicentre of a cultural renaissance. In a context marked by the dynamic interplay between the innovative language of the modern avant-garde and the city’s artistic heritage, Luigi Moretti emerged as a key figure… Read More

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

James Dunbar and Editors

Adolfo Natalini (1941–2020) was an Italian architect. A member of the ‘School of Pistoia’ Pop Art group in the early 1960s, Natalini combined his Pop aesthetic with critique and irony in his thesis work at the University of Florence School of Architecture, graduating in 1966.[1] Soon after, he co-founded Superstudio… Read More

In the Archive: New and Found 4

In the Archive: New and Found 4

Editors

Click on drawings to move. 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 On the digital planchest this time is a collection… Read More

OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade

OMA: Rotterdam—Child’s Crusade

Richard Hall

This is the third post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

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

OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds

OMA: Elia Zenghelis—Watersheds

Richard Hall

This is the second post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor

O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor

Diogo Lopes and Fanny Noël

This drawing emerged within the framework of a summer school in Berlin, organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers for his Cornell students in 1977. The project was developed by the German architect together with his assistants, Peter Riemann, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska and it offers a vision for… Read More

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More

OMA: London—Foreplay

OMA: London—Foreplay

Richard Hall

This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)

Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)

Neil Bingham

Snap, crackle, pop. Oh, that horrible sound of unravelling a roll of architectural drawings on old dried-up tracing paper from the nineteenth century. Slowly unfurling the brown brittle sheet, it cracks and shatters, little bits drop off in flakes, littering the table and floor like confetti. The experience feels like… Read More

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

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. Despite predictions of the… Read More