Period: c20th
O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor
17.05.2024
O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor17.05.2024
– Diogo Lopes and Fanny Noël
This drawing emerged within the framework of a summer school in Berlin, organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers for his Cornell students in 1977. The project was developed by the German architect together with his assistants, Peter Riemann, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska and it offers a vision for… Read More
John Hejduk’s Farm Library
15.05.2024
John Hejduk’s Farm Library15.05.2024
– Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh
Farm Library is one among the sixty-eight entities that John Hejduk designed for the Lancaster/Hanover Masque. It is a primitive round object, with a spiral staircase positioned in its centre, running from the ground to the top. The bookshelves of the library are aligned with the boundary of the building, maintaining a distance… Read More
Banham in Buffalo
13.05.2024
Banham in Buffalo13.05.2024
[Our] main emphasis in this course has been on using primary sources in studying architectural history. By this I mean that we have been using the building itself as the first source of information about the history of the building.[1] Reyner Banham moved to America in 1976 to take up… Read More
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture
06.05.2024
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture06.05.2024
What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 3
03.05.2024
In the Archive: New and Found 303.05.2024
– Editors
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New There was excitement when Enzo Mari’s resin… Read More
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture
01.05.2024
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture01.05.2024
This article first appeared in German: ‘Der gut gebaute Witz’ in Der Architekt 4/21 ‘Effekt und Affekt, Psychologie in der Architektur’ (2021), 60-63. 18 September 2021 Kurt W. Forster writing to Holger Kleine (translated from German) ‘… reading your essay on Paul Rudolph’s Hastings Hall. A fabulous piece, itself a kind of… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture
29.04.2024
Sugimoto and Architecture29.04.2024
The early twentieth century saw a multifaceted blossoming of the avant-garde in Europe, with Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl… These movements also had an influence on architecture. Until the nineteenth century, people’s way of living was centred around religion. Much architectural decoration was developed in order to express the magnificence… Read More
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff
29.04.2024
Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff29.04.2024
– David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff
This interview is excerpted from the catalogue of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which was on show at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October 2023 – 07 January 2024, and is touring to UCCA Beijing and MCA Australia. Copies of the catalogue can be purchased here. Ralph Rugoff: Hiroshi Sugimoto has… Read More
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?
26.04.2024
James Stirling, and the Industrialization of Architecture?26.04.2024
James Stirling’s presentation drawing from 1957 to a faculty of engineers might seem strangely familiar to contemporary architects. A section of a box, showing the structure, services, and how people might dwell inside—it almost anticipates the prefabricated modular construction architects are now being asked to design. Only a few years… Read More
A Bath for Immortality
24.04.2024
A Bath for Immortality24.04.2024
It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter
23.04.2024
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter23.04.2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19.04.2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19.04.2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim
17.04.2024
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim17.04.2024
Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)
15.04.2024
Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)15.04.2024
Snap, crackle, pop. Oh, that horrible sound of unravelling a roll of architectural drawings on old dried-up tracing paper from the nineteenth century. Slowly unfurling the brown brittle sheet, it cracks and shatters, little bits drop off in flakes, littering the table and floor like confetti. The experience feels like… Read More
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings
12.04.2024
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings12.04.2024
On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More
DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata
10.04.2024
DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata10.04.2024
Enzo Mari’s Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata (Dynamic Formation of a Reticulated Sphere), one of a series of objects produced under the title Relatione tra Contenuto e Contenitore (Relation between Content and Container), was manufactured by the Milanese company Danese between 1959 and 1963. It is a transparent polyester… Read More
C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral
05.04.2024
C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral05.04.2024
In view here is a startling watercolour by Charles Stanley Peach, titled Plan of a Church Constructed on Divine Principles (1910)—his pictorial articulation of the cruciform layout of the Christian Cathedral. Architectural aspects are overlayed upon two images of Jesus. The first with his arms splayed wide, hands pinned to… Read More
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door
03.04.2024
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door03.04.2024
This is the sixth part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, here. Entering the house the first thing one sees is the entrance door to my… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter
02.04.2024
Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter02.04.2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940), trained first at the Royal Institute of Technology (where he would teach from 1931), and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, undertook an extensive study tour of Greece and Italy, and opened his own practice around 1913, working entirely in Sweden, and… Read More
The Captive Globe
28.03.2024
The Captive Globe28.03.2024
This essay is about a drawing—or rather, about the insight embedded within that drawing and the life it has taken on in the forty-five years since it was made. The drawing in question is The City of the Captive Globe. It was created in 1972, first published in 1978 by… Read More
Masterplanning the University of London
27.03.2024
Masterplanning the University of London27.03.2024
Legend has it that Charles Holden promised the University of London a building that would last five hundred years. While there is no hard evidence for Holden’s claim, his Senate House (1932–37) looks as permanent as anything built in modern Britain. A 19-storey tower faced with granite and Portland stone,… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25.03.2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25.03.2024
Andrea Branzi died on 9 October 2023 aged 84. The impact of one of his seminal works, No-Stop City, has been felt far and wide within architectural discourse. Since its production between 1967 and 1972, the drawings and collages of No-Stop City have haunted the camps within architectural academia that… Read More
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action
09.05.2024
Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action09.05.2024
– Mikael Bergquist
Hermann Czech: Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action) is on show at Fanz-Josef-Kai 3, Vienna, from 16 March – 9 June, 2024. On 15 March 2024, an exhibition on the Austrian architect Hermann Czech’s work opened in Vienna at the exhibition space Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 (fJk3). It is the first retrospective… Read More
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