Medium: sketchbook
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material
23 September 2021
Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material23 September 2021
This is a narrative of listening: listening to materials, processes, place and self. When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment – you perceive, touch, and smell its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently, you register the space that surrounds you. During the initial… Read More
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt
2 September 2021
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt2 September 2021
By Richard Hall
Notations is a collection of pamphlets in a box. Curating the content in this manner has allowed the editors to present the publication as a physical representation of their thesis that the notebook is a device for the cultivation of individual worlds. The plurality is important. The pamphlets are collected… Read More
Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia
18 August 2021
Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia18 August 2021
By Biba Dow
This painting was made in the early evening in the main square of the medieval town of Gubbio, in central Italy (Perugia). Reached by climbing up narrow winding streets, the Piazza Grande opens out as a belvedere to the southwest, looking across rooftops to the plain below the Apennine foothills.… Read More
Keeping a Notebook
24 June 2021
Keeping a Notebook24 June 2021
By Simon Unwin
Looking into other people’s notebooks is to witness moments of creative exploration and growth. A graphic facility in others can provoke envy, but being given access into someone else’s mind and seeing where it wanders is always stimulating. As the examples published by Drawing Matter illustrate, architects’ notebooks harbour many… Read More
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989
2 June 2021
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 19892 June 2021
In his voyage to Samos in the Summer of 1989 Aldo Rossi gathered a collection of fragments in accordance with a Palladian education. The image repeats itself, following what Johns had written in 1984: ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two:… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz
18 May 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz18 May 2021
This is the twelfth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, Elizabeth Hatz discusses her personal experience of the pandemic and its consequences for… Read More
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things
8 March 2021
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things8 March 2021
By Paul Clarke
The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More
Architecture’s Mirror Stage
26 February 2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26 February 2021
Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More
Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism
19 February 2021
Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism19 February 2021
Walter Pichler’s sketches for the utopian city projects he developed with Hans Hollein in the early 1960s appear like arrangements of magnetised iron filings, blowing about the page to reveal mysterious momentary structures. Though they would later inform hardened isometric drawings, these forms are full of plasticity and, in this… Read More
The Problem with Rainbows
12 February 2021
The Problem with Rainbows12 February 2021
Resta sempre insoluto il problema dell’arcobalenoPare que ce ne sia uno dopo la pioggiaE che dall’alto con l’aereoSi veda tutto tornaMa questo metterebbe in crisi tutto quelliChe cercano la pentola d’oro Alle fine dell’arcobaleno C’e sempre un arcobalenoAl di sopra di ogni questione sulla quantitàE qualità dei suoi coloriDopo la pioggiaMa non dopo ogni pioggia… Read More
The Values of Profiles (1951)
8 January 2021
The Values of Profiles (1951)8 January 2021
Provoked by the assertion of rational architecture, the beginnings of modern non-figurative art coincide in time with the exclusion from the world of living forms of cornices and profiles, the most evidently ‘abstract’ elements of ancient architecture. At least two reasons may be relevant to this singular phenomenon: one is… Read More
Sketches from Algiers
2 August 2021
Sketches from Algiers2 August 2021
By Adam Voelcker
In October 1975 I returned to Cambridge to complete my architecture course. I had spent my year out in London with MacCormac and Jamieson, an exciting time as it was early days for this young practice and I was one of their very first assistants. In fact, I nearly didn’t… Read More
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