Medium: text

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space 

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space 

Aikaterini Antonopoulou

Neglected Dimensions: Rough Sketches for Public Space by Paul Carter mediates between graphic form and text, movement-tracking, and place-making to delineate the interstices of public space: what escapes its formal description and what falls outside official design. The book responds to pertinent concerns about the interface between the designers of public… Read More

Protected: Rhythmic and Repetitive

Protected: Rhythmic and Repetitive

Nicola Simpson

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Reading Dirty Old River

Reading Dirty Old River

Marwa El Mubark

The act of looking is complex. It varies depending on the observer, the medium, and what is being observed. In Dirty Old River, the observer, Tom Emerson, is looking at the world through the eyes of photographers, writers, and artists among a larger set of characters. The observed range of artefacts… Read More

Tolerance

Tolerance

Tom Emerson

Too many people have talked about how profoundly the production of architecture has changed in the wake of the digital revolution. Far fewer have noted how architecture has resisted the seductive flourishes of digital production and maintained a dogged continuity with social and historical space. Bricks remain bricky even when… Read More

Protected: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter

Protected: Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter

Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Francesco Fiammenghi

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Le Corbusier, Album Punjab, 1951

Protected: Le Corbusier, Album Punjab, 1951

Maristella Casciato

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Gio Ponti at Drawing Matter

Gio Ponti at Drawing Matter

Maristella Casciato and Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Gio Ponti (1891-1979) was born in Milan, and while he had ambitions to become an artist, he enrolled in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano in 1913. He completed his studies in 1921 after serving in the war, and in the same year, he opened his firm. Ponti is often… Read More

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg

Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887-1865) trained in the fine and decorative arts before undertaking travels and varied apprenticeships to develop his architectural skills, opening a studio and teaching practice in La Chaux in 1912, and moving to Paris in 1917 to work principally as a… Read More

Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy

Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy

Peter Carl

Livia Lupi’s book Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy: Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice addresses a topic of recurring interest to readers of DM and DMJournal: the relation of actual to pictorial representations of architecture and its ornament in early fifteenth-century Italy. Harvey Miller has adorned… Read More

DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait

DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait

Elizabeth Merrill

Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de architectura (London, The British Museum, ms. 197.b.21) is one of the most enigmatic records of the architect’s celebrated career as a designer of machines. Born in the Sienese workshop and completed with an eloquent Latin dedication at the court of Urbino, the manuscript’s 195 unique drawings are both… Read More

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

C.M. Howell

Introduction A steady trickle of works on Dom Hans Van der Laan has appeared in the years since his passing in 1991. Most important among these, Richard Padovan has presented a compelling argument for the significance of Van der Laan’s theory of proportion through a series of texts, including Dom… Read More

Isou’s Bouleversement

Isou’s Bouleversement

Editors

Je pense que par la masse des définitions nouvelles et par la masse des secteurs inédits dévoilés, ce petit livre est le plus important ouvrage paru dans toute l’historie de l’architecture ou du moins le plus important ouvrage paru depuis plusieurs siécles en ce domaine. I believe that in terms… Read More

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. As architectural typologies, abattoirs, boucheries, and slaughterhouses embody the civilising of animal slaughter; serving as concrete expressions of the culture of animal consumption. Over time, the slaughterhouse has evolved in both its structures and perceptions, from a small-scale, craft-based operation rooted in necessity,… Read More

Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams

Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams

Wouter Van Acker

‘Only the realization of utopias will make man happy and release him from his frustrations! Use your imagination! Join in… Share the power! Share property.’ Wolf Vostell, Cologne 1969 [1] On June 28, 1969, the four members of the Viennese collective Zünd-Up presented their student project, The Great Vienna Auto-Expander, for Karl… Read More

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Cammy Brothers

Dear Niall, Before I forget, I wanted to send you the transcription from the Montano sheet. You can post it as my little discovery. Non dir di me se su di me non sai senza di te che poi di me dirai?Non fare ad aloro quello che a te non piace … 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

The Improvising Bouwmeester,* or: How Raymaekers’ Buildings Got Built 

The Improvising Bouwmeester,* or: How Raymaekers’ Buildings Got Built 

Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger and James Westcott

The following text first appeared in Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger, and James Westcott, Ad Hoc Baroque: Marcel Raymaekers’ Salvage Architecture in Postwar Belgium (Brussels: Rotor, 2023), 168, 174-178. *Master builder, from the middle ages, responsible for materials, design, construction, workforce, and client liaison.[1] Raymaekers rejected the modern diminution of the architect’s… Read More

Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette

Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette

Ana Bonet Miró

The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More

OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative

OMA: Rem Koolhaas—Initiative

Richard Hall

This is the sixth and final post, in the series 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: 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

Protected: Carcassonne and Viollet-le-Duc

Protected: Carcassonne and Viollet-le-Duc

Henry James

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

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

A Missing Drawing

A Missing Drawing

John Evelyn

Being casualy in the Privy Gallery at White-hall, his Majestie [Charles II] gave me thanks (before divers Lords & noble men) for my Book of Architecture & Sylva againe: That they were the best designed & usefull for the matter & subject, the best printed & designd (meaning the Tallè doucès [engravings] of the Paralelles) that… Read More