Period: c20th

Protected: Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition, at the Belvedere 21

Protected: Notes on the Visionary Spaces exhibition, at the Belvedere 21

Emerald Wise

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Eisenman on Rossi

Protected: Eisenman on Rossi

Peter Eisenman

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

Neil Bingham

Instruments of Building in Ancient Rome Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, portrays being an architect (architectus) in ancient Rome as a daunting task. The knowledge of the architect, he notes, must encompass the understanding of geometry, engineering, optics, history, philosophy, astronomy, and even music and medicine. At a… Read More

Protected: Per Line’s Basement

Protected: Per Line’s Basement

Isabella Palliotto

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. Premiered at this year’s La Biennale di Venezia, was Andres Veiel’s documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director known for Olympia (1936) and Triumph des Willens (1935). Framed through archival material Veil’s Riefenstahl (2024) demonstrates how her work was inextricably linked to… 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

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More

Protected: Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers

Protected: Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers

Gina Morrow

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Goldfinger—Planning Your Neighbourhood

Erin McKellar

At first glance Planning Your Neighbourhood appears as a series of prints in a case, and its use is unclear. This series of twenty prints was created by modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger, artist Ursula Blackwell, illustrator Shiela Hawkins, landscape architect Peter Shepheard and their assistant Martin Cobbett. Rather than solely… Read More

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World

Fabrizio Gallanti

A long time before the surge of the Internet and the diffusion of portable devices connected to it, seeping into our eyes incessant flows of images, the relationship of people to their surroundings was profoundly altered by photography, and then cinema. The carefully curated exhibition Photo City: How Images Shape the… 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.

Streetscapes: Bath

Streetscapes: Bath

Ptolemy Dean

The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More

OMA: Collaborators—Allies

OMA: Collaborators—Allies

Richard Hall

This is the fifth post, in a series of six, 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: 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

Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay at Drawing Matter

Matt Page

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Notes on Nabokov

Notes on Nabokov

Michael Becker

Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

Editors and John Summerson

In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Claude Parent at Drawing Matter

Editors and Chloé Parent

Drawing Matter is honoured to have recently added to the collection a group of 60 drawings by Claude Parent, which were selected in very generous collaboration with Chloé Parent and the Claude Parent Archives. In the wider context of the collection, we see these drawings as offering unique access to… 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

OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project

OMA: Big Competitions—Reorienting the Modern Project

Richard Hall

This is the fourth post, in a series of six, 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

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Erin Besler, Marshall Brown, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith

The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More

Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate

Resistance and the ‘Architecture of Pessimism’: John Hejduk’s House for the Inhabitant who Refused to Participate

Anna Kostreva

Many people reach a point in their lives at which they realise that they should protest the status quo. Some people make the realisation but remain frustrated, stuck, or blocked from enacting the necessary change. How do we face, name, and act according to our most fundamental realisations and what… Read More