Period: c20th
N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory
19.05.2025
N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory19.05.2025
After entering Smart’s Place, and climbing the steep staircase of treads (that become increasingly high and shallow until all the tension in my body was focused on my toes gripping and my weight not leaning back*), I arrived at the space of Drawing Matter where Rosie had indiscriminately laid out… Read More
Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)
16.05.2025
Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)16.05.2025
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
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter
13.05.2025
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter13.05.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The drawings archive held by Mies at the time of his death was placed in the Museum of Modern Art, and his correspondence and papers at the Library of Congress. They constitute a comprehensive record of his works after the opening of his practice in the United States, especially for… Read More
Fine Art and Commercial Architecture
08.05.2025
Fine Art and Commercial Architecture08.05.2025
Architects are touchy about whether they are making art or not. At a conference in Santa Monica several years ago Cesar Pelli was very concerned that his architecture be considered art. This is an ambiguity of European usage. As one of ‘the arts,’ architecture is an art. Visual art is… Read More
Protected: Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter
07.05.2025
Protected: Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter07.05.2025
– Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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
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
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
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
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
We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68
23.05.2025
We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 6823.05.2025
– Carl Williams
Against Pairing Drawing Matter generously responded to my request to loan two items from their collection to be used as realia in an exhibition of May 1968 posters at Tank Magazine’s showroom on Great Portland Street. The items (DMC 2465 and 2302) are both lithographs in black and red, and… Read More
topographic/cartographic urban form politics DMC