Period: c20th
One Thing Leads to Another
23.04.2020
One Thing Leads to Another23.04.2020
Architecture rarely results from a singular eureka moment or a spontaneous act of genius. The myth of the napkin sketch is precisely a myth. The lucidity it suggests is essential, but it is seldom instantaneous or hermetic. It comes from work. In architecture, this work is of a special kind,… Read More
Language & the Doorn Manifesto
14.04.2020
Language & the Doorn Manifesto14.04.2020
The following audio clips are extracts from an interview with Peter Smithson conducted in 1997 for the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. To listen to the full interview, click here. On language Peter Smithson on the change from the use of French to English as the predominant language of… Read More
The Garden of Earthly Delights
09.04.2020
The Garden of Earthly Delights09.04.2020
The essay is an excerpt from Gabriel Guevrekian: The Elusive Modernist, by Hamed Khosravi, published by Hatje Cantz. Pre-order through the publisher’s website or visiting www.guevrekian.org.
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)
08.04.2020
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)08.04.2020
Sixteen swim in synchrony. Bright red trunks, blue swim caps, in a perfectly choreographed 4 x 4 grid of bodies in motion. They swim in the shallow pale blue pool that contains them, as it floats in the ocean. They are about to collide with a dock that is too… Read More
Where Words Fail
06.04.2020
Where Words Fail06.04.2020
– Cyril Babeev and Matt Page
This drawing, a sketched site plan annotated in cursive old-Russian, was published in May 1903 in the Saint Petersburg-based architecture magazine Zodchiy (Зодчій). [1] The plan describes a nearly-square plot sited perpendicular to a street (ulitza, улица) and divided into three areas: a house, represented by a white void; a garden in the… Read More
Web of Intrigue
03.04.2020
Web of Intrigue03.04.2020
Searching the internet for the drawings of Michael Sorkin, one comes across a lengthy list of the projects that have emerged from his eponymously titled studio. Halfway down the list can be found an exotic beauty of a drawing soberly captioned thus: House of the Future. 1999. Coloured Pencil, Hand… Read More
Drawing Culture at SOM New York
03.04.2020
Drawing Culture at SOM New York03.04.2020
When I joined SOM in 1963, design drawings were done in pencil on yellow tracing paper with occasional use of coloured pencils. In the mid-60s this changed to magic markers. When working on a project under Sherwood Smith for a college campus, we drew the site plans with thin pen… Read More
Gowan on the English House
01.04.2020
Gowan on the English House01.04.2020
When asked to write for Zodiac about his villa at Chester, built in 1982 for the furniture magnate Chaim Schreiber, James Gowan choses Robert Lorimer and Edwin Lutyens as his references. It is clear that he identifies with Lorimer particularly – another Scotsman, asked to build a house for a good client… Read More
Retail Therapy
30.03.2020
Retail Therapy30.03.2020
In architectural design the size of the human unit must always be borne in mind. It is nowhere more necessary to observe this maxim than in the determination of the scale of shop fronts, for here not only is the tendency to an undue magnification of parts most strongly encouraged… Read More
Houses of Work and Play
30.03.2020
Houses of Work and Play30.03.2020
The Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP), designed by Álvaro Siza, is set on a hillside, close to a road bridge at the mouth of the river Douro. The bridge seems to be part of the extended composition of the campus; the school-city a gateway to the… Read More
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art
27.03.2020
Take One: Henry ‘Jim’ Cadbury-Brown and Richard Wentworth on the Royal College of Art27.03.2020
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
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse
25.03.2020
Peter Blake & Adolfo Natalini: From Mies to Mickey Mouse25.03.2020
Sometimes, in the space between the archive and the library at Shatwell, we make nice conjunctions. Here together are Peter Blake in 1992, old and very angry, writing for Abitare about the decline of architecture in late twentieth-century America; and Adolfo Natalini in 1972, young and thrilled to have got there, sketching… Read More
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built
20.03.2020
‘I chose a distant meadow’: The House that Neutra Built20.03.2020
There are several curiosities in the plan of this classic modernist house by Richard Neutra. First, more area is allowed for dogs than for music. Second, there is a two-car garage, but a separate parking-space for a Rolls-Royce. Here is fine discrimination. But fine discrimination is exactly what you would… Read More
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)
09.03.2020
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)09.03.2020
Alvar Aalto, from an interview for the Swedish newspaper Åbo Underrättelser, May 22, 1930. Reprinted in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: Sketches, trans. Stuart Wrede (London: MIT Press, 1979), 16.
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building
06.03.2020
Take One: James Gowan and Sandra Lousada on the Leicester Engineering Building06.03.2020
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
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)
05.03.2020
Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)05.03.2020
– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold
03.03.2020
Biba Dow on Giorgio Morandi: Group and Threshold03.03.2020
– Biba Dow
Giorgio Morandi’s work focused on studying again and again a small group of domestic objects – vases, jugs, bottles – in his home in Bologna. During his adult life, he produced a large quantity of paintings and etchings which together build up a shimmering representation of his field of focus.… Read More
Seeing, and Disbelieving
02.03.2020
Seeing, and Disbelieving02.03.2020
It is easy enough to say that the analysis of any architectural drawing begins with asking what it is for. But trying to answer this innocent question, which applies equally to the purpose for which the drawing was intended and for which we are now looking at it, presents many… Read More
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan
01.03.2020
In the Archive: OMA, Neutelings, Hejduk, Gowan01.03.2020
– Richard Hall and Emma Rutherford
Click on drawings to move and enlarge (fullscreen version). In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. When faced with a mass of unknown information, one tends to start with… Read More
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’
28.02.2020
Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’28.02.2020
– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.
Leto Litho Leningrad
20.02.2020
Leto Litho Leningrad20.02.2020
Joseph Brodsky, in his short essay ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’ (1979), wrote: The characteristic features of Leningraders are: bad teeth (because of lack of vitamins during the siege), clarity in pronunciation of sibilants, self-mockery, and a degree of haughtiness towards the rest of the country. Mentally this city… Read More
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer
23.04.2020
BV Doshi: Drawn Closer23.04.2020
– Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi and Sarah Handelman
I was fifty years old when I started designing Sangath, my office in Ahmedabad. In India, when you cross fifty, suddenly – biologically, psychologically – you start to think about what in your life you have discovered. When I made the first drawings, I was thinking about many things: although… Read More
commerce drawn closer (series) DMC sketch section