Period: c20th

We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68

We are the Power: Posters from Paris, May 68

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

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

Abel Sloane

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)

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

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

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

Fine Art and Commercial Architecture

Donald Judd

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

Protected: Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

Jean Tinguely: La Vittoria

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

Protected: Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays

Nat Chard and Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove —The Study, Pot Plants & Pottery

Adrian Dannatt

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

River Arno

River Arno

Ivo Poças Martins

In Florence, the flooding of the River Arno on November 4, 1966 was of a magnitude not seen in almost 500 years of history. The city, built on this alluvial plain, was flooded and the river overflowed its banks, filling areas as far away as the Piazza del Duomo with… Read More

Processing Process

Processing Process

Pablo Garcia

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

Exploding Art and Architecture: Zaha Hadid’s Irish Prime Minister’s Residence Sketchbook

Catherine Howe

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

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

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Francis Martinuzzi

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

Protected: Notes on Urban Form

Protected: Notes on Urban Form

Editors and Ingrid Schroder

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Walter Marchetti: Observation of the Movements of a Fly

Walter Marchetti: Observation of the Movements of a Fly

Matt Page

A fly lands on a windowpane. It pauses for a few seconds before crawling across the surface. It stops again, and waits. It flies off the glass and drops down at another point. It crawls, pauses; crawls, waits. This routine continues from 7 in the morning until 8 at night…… 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

Curtains

Curtains

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

Leicester Engineering Building: Un-detailing

Reyner Banham

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

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

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

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

Broadcasting Norwegian Time

Broadcasting Norwegian Time

Jørgen J. Tandberg

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

Elizabeth Chesterton & Tomorrow Town: A New Town Thesis by Architectural Association Students

Mary Mitchell

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

DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation

Peter Carl

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