Period: c20th
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 1970
17.01.2023
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 197017.01.2023
Watch Philippa Lewis’s recent lecture, ‘From Drawing to Text’, on how we tell stories from architecture, for The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology here. Geoff Freeman, sales director of a Northamptonshire shoe company, arrives at JFK Airport for his flight… Read More
The ESB’s New Clothes
12.01.2023
The ESB’s New Clothes12.01.2023
In 1965 sixteen late-eighteenth-century houses on the east side of Fitzwilliam Street Lower, Dublin were demolished. They had served as headquarters of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and in their place was to be a new company HQ, a 1961 competition-winning scheme by the partnership of Sam Stephenson and Arthur… Read More
Materia 4: Brick
10.01.2023
Materia 4: Brick10.01.2023
This text is the fourth in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Coarse rectangular lumps of clay mixed with straw and water, small enough to be carried in one or two hands, are laid… Read More
The City of Design
09.01.2023
The City of Design09.01.2023
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III
06.01.2023
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III06.01.2023
This is the final of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as a young architect in London and Dorset. As he… Read More
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair
05.01.2023
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair05.01.2023
Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More
Owen Luder: Practice at Work
03.01.2023
Owen Luder: Practice at Work03.01.2023
The day-to-day workings of a practice such as OLP fall into two separate yet overlapping sectors: administration and job organisation. Unless these two are properly related and maintained, no amount of design talent, no amount of entrepreneurial vigour or personal charm will keep the practice alive and flourishing. For, despite… Read More
Drawing for James Stirling
20.12.2022
Drawing for James Stirling20.12.2022
Looking back forty years or so on my time in the basement of Jim Stirling’s office in Gloucester Place feels like travelling centuries. Today it is inconceivable that a world-renowned architect and Pritzker Laureate would show a client around the office wanting him to look at the equipment and be… Read More
Beverly Buchanan: Here I am; I’m Still Here
15.12.2022
Beverly Buchanan: Here I am; I’m Still Here15.12.2022
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth
09.12.2022
DMJ – The Sound of Magma: Geographies of Infrasound, Vibrating Bodies, and Representing the Earth09.12.2022
What does the inside of the earth sound like? Do continental margins have a signature key? Does magma whistle? These questions preoccupied the scientist Frank Perret in the early 20th century as he sought to develop the new science of volcanology. For Perret, though, listening to the earth was not… Read More
Open Letters: Harvard GSD
02.12.2022
Open Letters: Harvard GSD02.12.2022
Drawing Matter has been enjoying Open Letters, published bi-weekly by Harvard University Graduate School Of Design, from the start. In part, this is because our own publishing initiative began at much at the same time – now ten years ago – and proceeds at the same pace, and with a little of the… Read More
Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília
30.11.2022
Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral in Brasília30.11.2022
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville
23.11.2022
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville23.11.2022
– Editors
Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York, was one of three co-operative Usonian communities founded in the late 1940s. The other two, The Acres (also known as Galesburg Country Homes) and Parkwyn Village were both near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They all involved Frank Lloyd Wright as the overall site planner and in each… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21.11.2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21.11.2022
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House
18.11.2022
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: Models for the City House18.11.2022
Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More
DMJ – From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps
15.11.2022
DMJ – From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps15.11.2022
This text, published alongside Jonathan Foote’s article ‘Borromini’s Smudge’, marks the launch of the first and second issues of DMJournal–Architecture and Representation. Over the coming months, we will be publishing articles from both DMJ 1: The Geological Imagination and DMJ 2: Drawing Instruments/Instrumental Drawings. The Geological Imagination will be published… Read More
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review
10.11.2022
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (2022) – Review10.11.2022
“The history of modern architecture is the history of its exhibitions,” states the introduction of the anthology ‘Exhibiting Architecture’, [1] and it is hard to deny the central role of exhibitions in the writing of the canonic and the public history of architecture. Yet the exclusionary nature of the history… Read More
Heinz Isler Model
02.11.2022
Heinz Isler Model02.11.2022
– John Chilton and Paul Shepherd
This text was written by Paul Shepherd. The interjections, in italic, are additions by his friend and Heinz Isler expert John Chilton. If you go down to the woods today… Since our son was away on Scout camp all weekend, my plans for Sunday involved a much-needed lie-in and an… Read More
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients
26.10.2022
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients26.10.2022
In October 1925 Le Corbusier wrote to his client Madame Meyer a remarkable letter about his proposal with Pierre Jeanneret for her villa. It combined drawings with a highly scripted text that carefully guided her through each space, from the entrance to the roof garden. Like the pioneers of early… Read More
Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review
20.10.2022
Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models – Review20.10.2022
The basement exhibition space at F’AR Lausanne is dominated by a forest of delicate metal and glass tilting tables within which drawings have been placed. When rotated from the horizontal, they give the large, artificially lit room the feeling of a drawing studio at the end of the day; the… Read More
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism
19.10.2022
‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism19.10.2022
As my title indicates, this text will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France… Read More
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review
10.10.2022
Missing Link: Strategies of a Viennese Architecture Group (1970-1980) – Review10.10.2022
There is a strange moment in the second room of the exhibition, where all kinds of great works are hung on the walls to admire, organised around a central display of plastic and aluminium furniture: a collage of a car hovering like the golden calf amidst a crazed crowd; a… Read More
The Sasada Lab
16.01.2023
The Sasada Lab16.01.2023
– Felix Wilson
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
landscape architecture foundation writing prize 2022