Period: c20th
DMJ – From Team 4 to Foster Associates: Condensed Narratives and Expanded Storytelling
30.10.2025
DMJ – From Team 4 to Foster Associates: Condensed Narratives and Expanded Storytelling30.10.2025
The work of Team 4 Architects (1963–1967) and Norman and Wendy Foster’s continuation as Foster Associates (1967–1992) is typically examined through their built projects rather than through their extensive drawing repertoire and its imaginative potential. This article unpacks the narrative strategies employed by the two British practices, focusing on the… Read More
Protected: Drawings of Architectures
28.10.2025
Protected: Drawings of Architectures28.10.2025
– Primitivo González and Niall Hobhouse
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter
27.10.2025
Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter27.10.2025
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Francesco Fiammenghi
To probe the long and multifaceted career of Andrea Branzi (1938–2023), one must first turn to his formative years at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence in the early 1960s. At the time, the Florence School became the incubator of several of Italy’s postwar avant-garde groups, including… Read More
Reason for Drawings
20.10.2025
Reason for Drawings 20.10.2025
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a certain drawing did NOT exist? I am forever grateful to Cedric Price for doing this drawing. If he had not done it, my job of devising a way to order and organise materials for what became Cedric Price Works 1952-2003: a forward-minded retrospective (AA/CCA,… Read More
Protected: The Ingredients of the Pudding: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Christmas Cards
13.10.2025
Protected: The Ingredients of the Pudding: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Christmas Cards13.10.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Le Corbusier, Album Punjab, 1951
13.10.2025
Le Corbusier, Album Punjab, 195113.10.2025
The following text first appeared in Maristella Casciato, Le Corbusier Album Punjab, 1951 (Zurich: Lars Müller Publications, 2024), 17–21. * Le Corbusier embarked on his first visit to the Indian state of Punjab in 1951 in anticipation of the planning and construction of Chandigarh. Included in his luggage was a notebook, which he… Read More
John Hejduk: Means, Ends
09.10.2025
John Hejduk: Means, Ends09.10.2025
Peter Eisenman was wrong… It is architecture, even if you can’t ‘get in it.’[1] But he was also right… ‘The tradition of the architect-writer is well precedented in the history of architecture.’[2] It might remain a question without an answer, though it is curious that on large, the once hyphenated… Read More
Protected: The Viennese School at Drawing Matter
08.10.2025
Protected: The Viennese School at Drawing Matter08.10.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter
01.10.2025
Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter01.10.2025
– Editors
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Ulrich Rückriem’s Anröchter Dolomit Projekt
29.09.2025
Ulrich Rückriem’s Anröchter Dolomit Projekt29.09.2025
A drawing for?A drawing of?Before?After?An explanation?An idea?An instruction?Precise?Approximate?Careful?Loose?For the artist?For us?For sale? A seemingly quiet drawing raises many questions. Ulrich Rückriem splits, saws and breaks stone. It is a process that defies determination through drawing—or perhaps one that is itself drawing. How can an idea be drawn for a material… Read More
Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City
24.09.2025
Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City24.09.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Bernat Klein Studio
18.09.2025
Bernat Klein Studio18.09.2025
Travelling north through the Borders over the years, regardless of route, a diversion along a twisting country road north of Selkirk was always on the cards. Navigating a dangerous bend in the road, no time to stop, was rewarded by a fleeting glimpse of an enigmatic presence amongst the trees.… Read More
Excuse My Dust, or the Air I Breathe: Notes on Architecture in the Archives
15.09.2025
Excuse My Dust, or the Air I Breathe: Notes on Architecture in the Archives15.09.2025
The following text is a partially revised version of that delivered and published in ‘Stoà Open Seminar. Emerging perspectives on teaching and research in architectural design’ (May 2024). It has since become the conceptual framework for a series of seminars held on the same subject at the School of Architecture… Read More
Protected: Teatro del Mondo
09.09.2025
Protected: Teatro del Mondo09.09.2025
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Tolerance
04.09.2025
Tolerance04.09.2025
Too many people have talked about how profoundly the production of architecture has changed in the wake of the digital revolution. Far fewer have noted how architecture has resisted the seductive flourishes of digital production and maintained a dogged continuity with social and historical space. Bricks remain bricky even when… Read More
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato
01.09.2025
In the Archive: Maristella Casciato01.09.2025
From April to July, Maristella Casciato was Drawing Matter’s Visiting Scholar—our first in London. During her time in the archive, she made new discoveries and started many stimulating conversations. Among other things, she closely studied Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Punjab Grille Capitol album, translated a selection of Gio Ponti’s illustrated letters,… Read More
Carlos Diniz: London 2025
29.08.2025
Carlos Diniz: London 202529.08.2025
– Editors
‘As a piece of urban design [it] is simply abysmal. A wonderful opportunity to create a new place in London with innovative urban forms has been missed… The layout is simplistic and banal, the architecture lumpy and mediocre—the whole looks like a chunk of some ageing, tired and dreary US… Read More
Orgonic Architecture
21.08.2025
Orgonic Architecture21.08.2025
A face is drawn over a torso; breasts are transformed into eyes with nipples as pupils, the nose curves along the edge of the ribcage, and the belly button is the pursed smoking and kissing mouth, above hangs a necklace made of spherical beads, acting like a curled fringe. The… Read More
DMJ – Riddle as Method, Transparency at Play: Aldo Van Eyck at Baambrugge
18.08.2025
DMJ – Riddle as Method, Transparency at Play: Aldo Van Eyck at Baambrugge18.08.2025
As work on site at the Orphanage (1956-1960) neared completion, Aldo van Eyck was busy exploring and expanding the reach of his ideas through a number of interlaced and mutually generative projects, editorial of Forum magazine (1959-63), contributions to the reorganisation and ultimate dissolution of CIAM (1954-1960) and the design of a… Read More
Banana Ballpoint
14.08.2025
Banana Ballpoint14.08.2025
design for a ball-point pen to be the same size as a banana, in plastic with soft rubber skin, and in bold natural colour, technicolour preferably. based on the observation that a ‘peeled’ banana is good functional shape for writing—not unlike a quill pen nor much like one either. 1st… Read More
Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers
28.07.2025
Reading Between the Lines: The Language of Structural Engineers28.07.2025
A version of the phrase ‘engineering drawing is a universal language of signs and symbols’ appears in countless engineering drawing textbooks starting in the early twentieth century and continues today. A particularly evocative iteration published in the 1960s states: ‘[Engineering drawing] is a universal language; for the reader may be… Read More
Gio Ponti at Drawing Matter
21.07.2025
Gio Ponti at Drawing Matter21.07.2025
– Maristella Casciato and Rosie Ellison-Balaam
Gio Ponti (1891-1979) was born in Milan, and while he had ambitions to become an artist, he enrolled in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano in 1913. He completed his studies in 1921 after serving in the war, and in the same year, he opened his firm. Ponti is often… Read More
The Design Legacy of Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich
10.07.2025
The Design Legacy of Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich10.07.2025
After visiting the Tamart studio in Hoxton to see the collection of drawings by Tamar de Shalit and Arthur Goldreich, and the growing collection of furniture based on their designs, the editors asked Amos Goldreich to write this illustrated account of his parents’ remarkable lives both in South Africa and… Read More
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors
23.10.2025
Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors23.10.2025
– Lucien Hervé
We are thankful to Ross Anderson, who identified these statements Lucien Hervé made when interviewed by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, and which are pertinent to this contact sheet in the Drawing Matter Collection: ‘When Le Corbusier received me in his office one day, we talked for a long time; I remember that he… Read More
DMC photograph