Period: c20th
Peter Märkli: My Facade Material
21.04.2021
Peter Märkli: My Facade Material21.04.2021
– Editors
The following quotations are from ‘Mein Stoff für Fassaden (My Facade Material)’, a lecture delivered online by Peter Märkli to open a series of five talks for the Architecture Foundation. The quotations are presented here in a loose fashion, some treated as aphorisms about design, others illustrated with drawings from… Read More
The Vitruvian Man: With Fresh Eyes
14.04.2021
The Vitruvian Man: With Fresh Eyes14.04.2021
‘The Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci as a model of innovative entrepreneurship at the intersection of business, art and technology’ is shown in the first image. This is a ‘modern’ interpretation of the Renaissance drawing as a business model as published in the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2017. An… Read More
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound
08.04.2021
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound08.04.2021
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she… Read More
Hans Hollein: From a Distance
07.04.2021
Hans Hollein: From a Distance07.04.2021
On a page of Hans Hollein’s sketchbook, a cluster of adobe buildings climb slowly and modestly above the horizon, seeming to rise out of the earth. The sketch, produced in 1960 during the Austrian architect’s exploration of the western United States, feels unorthodox for Hollein, whose proclivity for radical, anti-Functionalist… Read More
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield
31.03.2021
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield31.03.2021
Dear Nicholas, It was wonderful to connect to your seminar and with you. We must catch up soon. I learned a lot from your presentation. And it brought back a flood of memories. Just now I quickly sketched the open plan house my father designed and had built in 1946,… Read More
André Arbus: Details Matter
29.03.2021
André Arbus: Details Matter29.03.2021
These presentation drawings – polished, finished, complete – were drawn by André Arbus in the 1950s. They are of a compact, open-plan apartment. Although they are not design drawings, they reveal a lot about the process of design. They communicate thought and care and suggest many drawings have come before them.… Read More
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield
26.03.2021
Working with Gowan: Housing at East Hanningfield26.03.2021
The Site Plan was one of the Planning drawings prepared for submission to Chelmsford District Council and Essex County Council. It is A1 size and drawn on Wiggins Teape 112 gram ‘Gateway’ tracing paper. The East Hanningfield job was the first on which ‘A’ sized paper had been used in… Read More
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre
22.03.2021
Derrida & Eisenman: Laugh(ing) of(f) the lyre22.03.2021
‘I think I understand, at least in principle.’ [1] Jacques Derrida tries to keep track of Peter Eisenman’s elaborate explanation. It is the 21st of April 1986, and in New Haven, Connecticut, philosopher and architect conduct the fifth of six meetings for their design of a garden in Bernard Tschumi’s… Read More
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing
22.03.2021
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing22.03.2021
‘House’ by Marie-José Van Hee is drawn on a sheet of trace, the edge of which is visible at the top, offset from the plain white ground for photographing or scanning. It is a freehand drawing that uses black graphite for lines, to hatch, shade, and achieve gradations of roughly rendered… Read More
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman
22.03.2021
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman22.03.2021
Laid down facing upwards and spread evenly on a neutral surface, 13 tin toys pose for a shot. Cedric Price’s robot collection – battery powered or clockwork, says the caption – includes a mechanical bird and rabbit, several spaceships, spacemen and robots. Their distinctive features intimate specific names, makers and… Read More
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’
18.03.2021
Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’18.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life. Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)
16.03.2021
Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005)16.03.2021
The following text is an excerpt from George Dodds’ book Building Desire: On the Barcelona Pavilion (2005), an analysis of the historiography and mythography of Mies’s building and its afterlives. The author reminded the Drawing Matter editors of the text, in response to our publication in June 2020 of an… Read More
Excerpt: Shadow Places
15.03.2021
Excerpt: Shadow Places15.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Simon Unwin’s book on shadow, in his series Analysing Architecture Notebooks, available here. For 20% off until May 31st 2021, use code KHL20. The piece is illustrated with drawings specially selected by Simon from the Drawing Matter collection. ‘Yea, though I walk through the… Read More
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem
11.03.2021
Hans Poelzig: Der Golem11.03.2021
I gaze at the screen, engrossed in the German horror film Der Golem (originally released in 1915 and reworked for reissue in 1920), a masterpiece of performance art. This cinematographic journey is my latest odyssey into the work of Hans Poelzig. The film catalogues his lesser-known work in the art… Read More
The MARS Group’s Plan for London, 1933-1944
08.03.2021
The MARS Group’s Plan for London, 1933-194408.03.2021
Collaboration within the field of architecture is as important as ever before. Construction projects grow increasingly complex, and pressing social issues need addressing. Yet we think of architects as unique and outstanding personalities that profoundly shape our built environment. This image of the architect as ‘genius’ is more present among… Read More
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things
08.03.2021
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things08.03.2021
The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More
Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ
08.03.2021
Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ08.03.2021
Charles Stanley Peach’s watercolour over pencil painting is executed by overlaying two forms of religious representation: figural images over a church plan reflecting a ceiling plan. The figurative depictions narrate accounts of Christianity through various portrayals of Christ; the most prominent being God, benevolent, and Jesus crucified. Other portraits of… Read More
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique
04.03.2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique04.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes
01.03.2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage
26.02.2021
Architecture’s Mirror Stage26.02.2021
Mirrors and mirrored glass, perhaps the most characteristically postmodern of surface treatments, were not only a material choice but also emblematized a turn inward toward what Sylvia Lavin has taken to calling ‘architecture itself.’ As the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might have put it, it was at this moment that modernist… Read More
Re-presenting the Rococo
24.02.2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24.02.2021
In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More
Take One: Architects on Drawing
23.02.2021
Take One: Architects on Drawing23.02.2021
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple
12.04.2021
The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple12.04.2021
– Frank Lyons
The Architecture of Nothingness: Drawing the Drawings As architects we have learned to read drawings almost instantly. At a glance we see what the spaces feel like, what it will be like to move around the building and perhaps even get a sense of the appropriateness of the structure. This ‘presentational’ way… Read More
publication concept & diagram religion