Period: c20th

Dalibor Vesely: Shared Horizons

Dalibor Vesely: Shared Horizons

Biba Dow

Looking at these drawings takes me instantly back to 1993. I am sitting next to Dalibor Vesely at my desk in Scroope Terrace in Cambridge. He is talking quietly and drawing on a stack of tracing paper which he has brought with him. He draws with a light hand in… Read More

Power & Public Space 9: Ana Bonet Miró – Fun Palace

Power & Public Space 9: Ana Bonet Miró – Fun Palace

Matthew Blunderfield and Ana Bonet Miró

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Since its conception in the 1960s, the Fun Palace has circulated widely in architecture culture, and mainly through its provocative collages, characterised… Read More

The Cod of São Victor

The Cod of São Victor

Pedro Bandeira

The following text on Mário Ramos and Fernando Barroso’s student work at the Porto School is excerpted from the publication Porto School, B Side 1968–1978 (An Oral History) (CIAJG & Documenta, 2014).  Jacinto Rodrigues recalls that in 1976 Mário Ramos, Fernando Barroso, Graça Nieto Guimarães and Maria de Lurdes Mendonça developed a project to… Read More

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Power & Public Space 8: Markus LäHteenmäki – Lev Rudnev’s Monument to the Victims of the Revolution

Matthew Blunderfield and Markus Lähteenmäki

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Markus Lähteenmäki’s research explores, in part, how architecture became instrumental in the societal and cultural transformations that took place in revolutionary Russia. … Read More

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Mark Dorrian and Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Drawing Matter is delighted to present three texts by Alberto Pérez-Gómez on architecture and its representation, the first writings by him to be carried on the Drawing Matter website. The first, ‘Architecture as Drawing’, is an early essay that initially appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1982, a… Read More

Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)

Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)

Matthew Blunderfield and André Patrão

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Parc de la Villette was emblematic of the strong ties made between the disciplines of architecture and philosophy in the 1980s, where… Read More

Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review

Freddie Phillipson ‘The Ulysses Project’ – Review

Peter Carl

The exhibition of Freddie Phillipson’s drawings reconstructing the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses opened on Bloomsday, helping to celebrate the centenary of the publication of the novel. The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in how the European city and its architecture support a culture, and for anyone interested… Read More

Materia 2: Corrugated Iron

Materia 2: Corrugated Iron

Gordon Shrigley

This text is the second 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. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller

Richard Hall

We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

Sir Edwin Lutyens, by his Son

Robert Lutyens

We have republished below an extract from Robert Lutyens’ short biography of his father, published in 1942, while Robert was serving in the RAF and two years before Edwin died. The book itself is uncomfortable — an odd mixture of personal portrait, family background, and an attempt to at once… Read More

Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)

Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)

Paul Stirton

Although not a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Jan Tschichold was appointed to the selection committee for the Werkbund’s Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo), to be held in Stuttgart between May and June 1929. FiFo was one of the most ambitious attempts to showcase recent developments in photography. The… Read More

Hexenhaus (2021) – Review

Hexenhaus (2021) – Review

Paul Clarke

‘THE FOREST THAT BUILT THE HOUSE’ There are two drawings for me that are significant in understanding the work of the Smithsons. Both are of Upper Lawn [1]. One is a drawing made by Peter Smithson of their Solar Pavilion in elevation, the other by Alison Smithson in plan. The… Read More

Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture

Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture

Pierre Riboulet

For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More

Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook

Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook

Manuel Montenegro

This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… Read More

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Part II

Freddie Phillipson

This is part two of two posts pairing Freddie Phillipsons’s drawings from The Ulysses Project with excerpts from James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, until 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international programme of events celebrating 100 years… Read More

Growing up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes (2021) – Review

Growing up Modern: Childhoods in Iconic Homes (2021) – Review

Gillian Darley

What do our birthplaces do to us? Should those homes be considered modernist jewels, the pride of their architects and, sometimes, of their patrons, how would that particular experience be imprinted on their children? Growing up Modern is a highly personal book in which the authors, Julia Jamrozik and Coryn… Read More

Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House

Benjamin Wistar Morris and a new Metropolitan Opera House

Janet Parks

A recent acquisition of six drawings by the American architect Benjamin Wistar Morris reveals his long involvement with one of the most important urban projects of the twentieth century. Morris’s role in this project was a highlight of his career although he has not been widely associated with it. A… Read More

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction

The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction

Freddie Phillipson

This text introduces The Ulysses Project by architect Freddie Phillipson, his exploration of the relationship between the buildings of Dublin and James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, from 17 June – 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international… Read More

Opportunism

Opportunism

Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford

While declaring explicitly architectural intentions (especially in the beginning), the enthusiastic appropriation of technologies and techniques peripheral to architecture has been a constant theme in OMA’s work. In 1976, Elia Zenghelis commented on the role of the telephone in their design process. [1] The photocopier and commercial printing would open up… Read More

Les Fêtes de Nuit (1937)

Les Fêtes de Nuit (1937)

Robert Chenevier

This is the best concise account of the technical sophistication behind the light and water installations created along and beside the Seine, for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937). We have added a group of gouache drawings by the architect René-André Coulon, made in the design phase for… Read More

Walter Segal, Self-Built Architect (2021) – Review

Walter Segal, Self-Built Architect (2021) – Review

Jane Hall

Given that architect Walter Segal was a Jewish immigrant, born in Berlin to Romanian parents, and a bit of a nomad, it seems unlikely that his best-known work would be confined entirely within London’s boroughs. Resident in the UK for perhaps longer than he had intended, it is in some… Read More

Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary

Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary

Guillermo S. Arsuaga

From eighteenth century primitive huts to the rise of barn living in the 1970s, buildings have served as the conceptual boundary between primordial formlessness and the organised world. But what if architecture begins with the very nature that it was invented to exclude? In 1971, the Madrilenian architect Fernando Higueras… Read More

CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the Archive (2020) – Review

CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the Archive (2020) – Review

Penelope Curtis

The Gordon Matta-Clark archive arrived at the CCA in Montreal 20 years ago. Shortly thereafter, it was used as part of an ‘archival exercise’: Out of the Box: Price, Rossi, Stirling + Matta Clark (23 October 2003–6 September 2004). That first ‘Out of the Box’ prefigures the one undertaken for this publication,… Read More

The Evolving Role of Drawing

The Evolving Role of Drawing

Nicholas Olsberg

This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More