Period: c19th
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints
21 December 2020
Anna Atkins: Laying Out the Blueprints21 December 2020
They began to bloom on websites a couple of years or so ago – stretching out on social media, unfurling in the arts sections. Pale alien shapes suspended in deep blue: something like lightning flattened in a flower press; a sleeping creature emerging from a cloud of coral; a spectral… Read More
Soane’s Temple Stye
16 December 2020
Soane’s Temple Stye16 December 2020
A temple for pigs? for swine? for hogs? Not a temple to worship them in, nor a temple for them to be sacrificed in. A temple for them to live in. These are not the pigs which invented their own form of latin, or those powerful Orwellian pigs, but normal… Read More
Drawing, Collaging, Rendering
9 December 2020
Drawing, Collaging, Rendering9 December 2020
When the ‘hard-line drawing’ has become so synonymous with the image of the architect it is easy to forget that the convenience of the everyday pen is relatively recent. For most of the long history of the world’s second-oldest profession, pen, paint and ink were reserved for competition boards or… Read More
Collection of Sections
2 December 2020
Collection of Sections2 December 2020
The following drawings and commentaries have been excerpted from Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections (Oro Editions, 2020). The publication surveys the use of section drawings in the histories of architecture and other professions, from the 17th century to the present. More information on the book can be found here.… Read More
William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’
26 November 2020
William Heath Robinson ‘Tightening the Green Belt’26 November 2020
On 22 March 1921, The Times reported on ‘the urgent need of a green belt being preserved round London.’ It was the first recorded use of the phrase. By the time William Heath Robinson came to makes sketches for ‘Tightening the Green Belt’ (c.1935–47), the urban ring o’ roses was familiar enough… Read More
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric
17 November 2020
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric17 November 2020
One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)
27 October 2020
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)27 October 2020
Excerpted from ‘Architect and Engineer’ 1936 January by William Hamilton.
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall
13 October 2020
Raymond Erith On Soane at Tendring Hall13 October 2020
The following notes were composed by Pierre du Prey to accompany his gift of the sketches pictured above to Drawing Matter, 16 September 2020. The circumstances surrounding two detailed sketches by Raymond Erithof the John Soane gate lodges at Tendring Hall, Suffolk, remain stronglyimpressed on the tablets of my memory.… Read More
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued
30 July 2020
Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued30 July 2020
When Drawing Matter recently reproduced a preliminary ground plan for Combe House near Gittisham, Devon, by John Soane, I had a moment’s sudden recollection. Ptolemy Dean’s penetrating analysis of this precious if battered sheet of paper – entirely in the astonishingly fluid and energetic hand of the architect – set me to search… Read More
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)
10 July 2020
The Birds’ Morning Hymn (1929)10 July 2020
From a letter to The Times of April 18, 1929: At this season of the resurrection of Nature — that ever-fresh miracle — one thing happens that even keen bird-lovers seem hardly to appreciate to the full. I mean the birds’ Morning Hymn. We have all heard vaguely about ‘Bird… Read More
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica
7 July 2020
Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica7 July 2020
– Paul Cox
My parents Oliver and Jean Cox were devoted ‘Jamaicophiles’, having worked on many projects in the country since the 1960s. One of the most enduring and absorbing was a proposed redevelopment of Port Royal as a renewal and upgrade of the historic city, rebuilding and restoring while making an interesting… Read More
Soane: Energy and Frustration
24 June 2020
Soane: Energy and Frustration24 June 2020
This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House
12 June 2020
Thomas Henry Wyatt’s Brook House12 June 2020
There is no building that tells the social and aesthetic story of Park Lane better than Brook House. From its beginnings as a scrappy country lane (‘Tyburn Lane’) in the eighteenth century, Park Lane rose to become the millionaires’ row of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and went on in… Read More
The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)
11 May 2020
The Decline of Architectural Drawing (1859)11 May 2020
The Royal Academy’s 1859 summer exhibition, combined with a number of architectural drawings on display in Conduit Street, left a less than positive impression on critic C. H. Smith. In an article published by The Builder, Smith describes what he sees as a decline in the quality of the architectural… Read More
Ruskin: Fairy Tales
22 April 2020
Ruskin: Fairy Tales22 April 2020
We all have a general and sufficient idea of imagination, and of its work with our hands and our hearts: we understand it, I suppose, as the imagining or picturing of new things in our thoughts; and we always show an involuntary respect for this power, wherever we can recognise… Read More
Summerson: The Little House
4 March 2020
Summerson: The Little House4 March 2020
– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino
8 January 2020
ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino8 January 2020
– Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff
From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’
27 November 2019
Adolphe Appia: ‘Luminous – Very Luminous’27 November 2019
I. In a melancholy mood, the Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia sat down at his drawing table in the little bed-sit he was renting in Geneva and took up his pencil and a little hardbound notebook to write down his ‘notes personelles / 1905’: ‘At my age, that of forty-three, I… Read More
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek
1 November 2019
Fontaine: Hide-and-Seek1 November 2019
Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space.… Read More
Behind the Lines 12
23 September 2019
Behind the Lines 1223 September 2019
1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More
Learning from the tortoise
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
The Meaning of Lines
11 January 2021
The Meaning of Lines11 January 2021
– Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga
A series of seemingly abstract lines occupy the whole space of the paper. Each of them is formed by a thin black line that defines the geometry, accompanied by a thicker, semi-transparent brown line, which highlights it. Written annotations are placed on top, sometimes following the drawing’s wavy shape like… Read More
plan theoretical & imaginary drawing matter writing prize 2020 DMC