Medium: sketchbook
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook
22 June 2022
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook22 June 2022
This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… Read More
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England
18 May 2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18 May 2022
During the upheavals of the Civil War, Westminster Abbey had functioned as the church of the state for the Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of Charles II, the Abbey resumed its historic role as the coronation church for English monarchs. [1] Parliament voted towards restoring the fabric, reinstituting its monarchical function… Read More
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing
22 April 2022
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing22 April 2022
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [1] I knew very little about the eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam prior to June 2014. When challenged to respond to his drawings of the Long Gallery at Syon House, my impulse was to visit and draw my way through… Read More
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings
31 January 2022
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings31 January 2022
As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the magi
19 January 2022
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the magi19 January 2022
Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 2
12 January 2022
In the Archive: New and Found 212 January 2022
– 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
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks
22 November 2021
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks22 November 2021
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza
These films were made over four hours on the afternoon of Sunday 25 March 2018 in Álvaro Siza’s studio in Rua do Aleixo outside Porto. I had flown to Portugal that morning with the seven sketchbooks which we were to look through with Manuel Montenegro. Manuel and I had conceived… Read More
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
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
– 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
Sketches from Algiers
2 August 2021
Sketches from Algiers2 August 2021
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
Keeping a Notebook
24 June 2021
Keeping a Notebook24 June 2021
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
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
On a handrail
30 November 2020
On a handrail30 November 2020
What drew me to the drawings Tony made, and the handrail itself, is the line it treads between standardisation and customisation. The way in which, for instance, standard sections of steel are bundled together and expressed to form thicker newel posts or to hold the glazing panels of the balustrade.… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing
13 November 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing13 November 2020
Similar to many of Rossi’s drawings, the Urban Fragment presents us with a collection of his most cherished forms – a primordial tower, the hand of a saint, and fragments of his own projects, such as the Gallaratese 2 housing complex in Milan and the Cemetery of San Cataldo. In… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler
12 November 2020
Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler12 November 2020
This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. Friedrich… Read More
Tree Speech
7 November 2020
Tree Speech7 November 2020
The following text is the fourth of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24 June 2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24 June 2022
– Pierre Riboulet
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
domestic sketch