Period: c20th
Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria
02.05.2025
Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria02.05.2025
– Editors
In 1970 Pierre Restany and Guido Le Noci, director of the Apollinaire gallery, decided to celebrate, with the help of the municipality of Milan, the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Nouveaux Réalistes group. On 27 November, ten years after Yves Klein published his single-issue newspaper Le Dimanche 27… Read More
Protected: Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays
01.05.2025
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery
01.05.2025
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery01.05.2025
Bringing the outside indoors, merging and blurring nature and culture, extending the garden into the study—such notions, a legacy of a generous North American sense of the landscape, from Fallingwater to the Case Study Houses, may have drifted into cliché but still, there is such glory to the actual open… Read More
Protected: From the Poetics of Reality to the Poetics of Memory
29.04.2025
Protected: From the Poetics of Reality to the Poetics of Memory29.04.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Processing Process
25.04.2025
Processing Process25.04.2025
It is not Walter Gropius’ fault that his drawing for a single-family row house is strikingly dull. Even the towering figures of architecture, those revered creators of space and form, must, at times, strip their visions down to something much simpler. Clear, unadorned, almost utilitarian sketches become the necessary language… Read More
Protected: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter
24.04.2025
Protected: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter24.04.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook
17.04.2025
Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook17.04.2025
Zaha Hadid’s sketchbook for the Irish Prime Minister’s Residence (1979-1980), held at the Zaha Hadid Foundation with corresponding works at Drawing Matter, has proved invaluable for understanding her early career development of ideas. The project marked Hadid’s first professional solo endeavour, and she established her own office around the same… Read More
Protected: Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)
10.04.2025
Protected: Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)10.04.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz
07.04.2025
Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 07.04.2025
Last year, Francis Martinuzzi contacted Drawing Matter after seeing a reproduction of one of his drawings on our website. The drawing was from a project from the submission for his architectural diploma with Jean Faloux under the tutelage of Antoine Grumbach at Unité Pédagogiuqe no. 6 (L’École nationale supérieure d’architecture… Read More
Walter Marchetti: Observation of the Movements of a Fly
04.04.2025
In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses
31.03.2025
In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses31.03.2025
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
Curtains
28.03.2025
Curtains28.03.2025
– Petra Blaisse and Sophie Wehtje
Brief email exchanges. When meeting physically is out of the question, good old-fashioned correspondence still works, even if and for some time now, it is done electronically. This is how many of the editorial pieces on the Drawing Matter website come into being—through a chain of typed messages. It’s a… Read More
Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing
21.03.2025
Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing21.03.2025
The building is in many ways as extraordinary as its details. At ground-floor level it confronts the visitor with a blank wall of hard-faced red brick, which is occasionally pierced with a rather private-looking doorway, except at the point where the glazed main-entrance lobby splits this defensive podium into two… Read More
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter
20.03.2025
Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter20.03.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams
14.03.2025
Zünd-Up’s Great Vienna War of Dreams14.03.2025
‘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
Broadcasting Norwegian Time
13.03.2025
Broadcasting Norwegian Time13.03.2025
All drawings were done by Nils Holter Office during the NRK project period 1941-47, each made in pencil on paper with the initials of the draughtsman who drew it. Drawings from Nils Holter’s archives/Jan Bauck Arkitektkontor. Photographs courtesy of Jørgen Johan Tandberg. In the summer of 2024, and after several… Read More
Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students
10.03.2025
Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students10.03.2025
In 1999, I was an undergraduate at Edinburgh University studying Architectural History when I undertook a work placement at the university archives. Here I was asked to help organise an uncatalogued collection received from the Patrick Geddes Centre at the Outlook Tower. Within this collection were 12 portfolios. Portfolio 7… Read More
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation
06.03.2025
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation06.03.2025
The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’.… Read More
Making their Curves Come True…
28.02.2025
Making their Curves Come True…28.02.2025
– Editors
By the 1950s, a generation of architectural draughtsmen had abandoned their Beaux Arts ‘curves’ for the rulers and set squares of High Modernism; they had to be tempted back, by whatever means, to drawing the irregular curves that were both a possibility—and a feature—of the new architecture of structural concrete.… Read More
Haunted Venice
21.02.2025
Haunted Venice21.02.2025
After Niall Hobhouse saw an image of my collage, Venice Haunted, he sent me some comparable images, including a Hogarth frontispiece for a book on perspective theory and practice (1745). Its caption reads: ‘Whoever makes a design without the knowledge of perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are… Read More
Isou’s Bouleversement
14.04.2025
Isou’s Bouleversement14.04.2025
– 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
DMC publication theoretical & imaginary