Medium: sketchbook
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing
13.11.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Appropriation and Drawing13.11.2020
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
12.11.2020
Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler12.11.2020
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
07.11.2020
Tree Speech07.11.2020
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
Tony Fretton: Tolerance
27.10.2020
Tony Fretton: Tolerance27.10.2020
The following text is an excerpt from AMAG 20 | Tony Fretton Architects. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the editors of the magazine for allowing us to reproduce the text on drawingmatter.org. To order a copy of AMAG 20, click here. Tolerance is a measure of… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31.08.2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31.08.2020
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’
23.07.2020
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’23.07.2020
The unbuilt half-dome (referred to by the architect as the ‘cupula’) at the Quinta da Malagueira is the subject of a protracted design process that has lasted for over four decades. At the start of 2020, Álvaro Siza sent a drawing of the half-dome to Drawing Matter accompanied by letter… Read More
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza
26.06.2020
The Real and Imagined Worlds of Álvaro Siza26.06.2020
Inside the cover of Álvaro Siza’s sketchbooks, there is a whole world: the real and the imagined. In his personal registers of the real, Siza accepts the world as it is. He uses drawing in a playful but productive way, learns when he apprehends, absorbs when drawing. This process of… Read More
Staging Brancusi
15.06.2020
Staging Brancusi15.06.2020
– Sarah Handelman and Asli Çiçek
Sarah Handelman: When we started talking about your work in scenography almost a year before, you were in the middle of designing the Brancusi exhibition, which opened last October at BOZAR in Brussels. Since then I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with you about the kinds of stages that… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer
11.06.2020
Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer11.06.2020
This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer
28.05.2020
Jaume Mayol / TEd’A Arquitectes: Drawn Closer28.05.2020
– Sarah Handelman and Jaume Mayol
This drawing for a house in Mallorca joins a number of sketches we made to understand the project. Each space is made of separate elements. To understand the space you need to dive into each element, and to understand each element you need to be in the space. To draw… Read More
Animals
05.05.2020
Animals05.05.2020
– James Gowan and Ellis Woodman
excerpted from The Architecture of James Gowan: Modernity and Reinvention (2008)
Plan with the form of a growling dog
29.04.2020
Plan with the form of a growling dog29.04.2020
I was drawing, endlessly it seemed, a hotel for a competition in Switzerland – fruitlessly as it turned out. I cheered myself along by seeing in the plan the face of an animal, a friendly bear, or more likely a dog. James’ ‘building with the form of a howling dog,’ which he… Read More
One Thing Leads to Another
23.04.2020
One Thing Leads to Another23.04.2020
Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23.04.2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23.04.2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25.03.2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25.03.2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan
01.03.2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan01.03.2020
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More
Next Year in Yemen
09.02.2020
Next Year in Yemen09.02.2020
‘Next year, there will be a civil war in Yemen. Please lend me the money so I can go now,’ I had the wit to ask my parents. It was after my first year in architecture school, not knowing that this journey would come to define me as an architect.… Read More
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments
09.12.2019
James Gowan Millbank: Sketches and Comments09.12.2019
The following text was first published in 1977 in an issue of AD Profiles dedicated to the Millbank Housing Competition. Run by the Crown Estate, the competition to develop a site adjacent to Vauxhall Bridge attracted nearly five hundred entries, including proposals from Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano,… Read More
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture
07.11.2019
The Difficulty of Designing Furniture07.11.2019
I Architecture: a tree here, a house there, or a temple; on the right a hill, or plain, sea, river; a bridge, regular outline of this street, the irregularity of another; colour, rhythms, climate, this client; yellowing photograph, parchment, power, marginality.Not as a matrix. Provocation, hence vocation to distort, to… Read More
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon
10.10.2019
Geoffrey Goes to Basildon10.10.2019
Charley in New Town is the peerless Halas and Batchelor film made for the government’s Central Office of Information in 1948, offering a utopian vision of new town living to the dazed postwar urban public. There is something of Charley, pedalling around the streets of the immaculately clean, smoke-free, Neo-Garden City,… Read More
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects
22.08.2019
Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects22.08.2019
The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More
The Matter of Drawing
03.08.2019
The Matter of Drawing03.08.2019
The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More
On a Handrail
30.11.2020
On a Handrail30.11.2020
– Jon Lopez
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
detail DMC