Period: c20th

In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

In the Archive: Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

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. During the peaceful and beautiful train ride that goes from London Paddington to Castle Cary, I dedicated time to thinking about what… Read More

Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury

Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury

Bill Sherman and Richard Temple

Quoted from the exhibition text of Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus, curated by Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute and Richard Temple, Archivist of the University of London. The exhibition continues until 17 March in the Chancellor’s Hall Lobby, First Floor, Senate House. More information here.… Read More

Simon Fraser University

Simon Fraser University

Arthur Erickson

This text is an excerpt from Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, co-published by Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture where the Arthur Erickson Archive is held. The text is reproduced with the kind permission of the Estate of Arthur Erickson. Recalling distant events is not easy, but those years two… Read More

Careful Crudeness

Careful Crudeness

Karen Olesen

At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre

Peter Wilson

Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More

The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review

The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto (2023) — Review

C.M. Howell

There is an ongoing debate within the field of theology and the arts concerning to what degree ‘theology’ must guide the discussion. Those on one side of the divide argue that unless the terms are clearly staked out within traditional discourses and literature in theology, we do not know what… Read More

Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with streamers everywhere

Josep Maria Jujol: Ribbons with streamers everywhere

Juan Mercadé Brulles, Jesús Esquinas-Dessy and Isabel Zaragoza

During the process of cataloguing drawings from the special collection of Josep Maria Jujol (1879-1949), housed in the graphic archive of the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB UPC), our attention was drawn to a particular drawing, illustrating a festive urban sequence.[1] At first glance, it is a captivating object, simultaneously… Read More

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras

Ahmed Belkhodja

Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More

Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction

Aqueduct of Malagueira—Complexity or Contradiction

Rodrigo Lino Gaspar

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More

Alberto Ponis, The London Years

Alberto Ponis, The London Years

Gillian Darley

I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More

DMJ – The Stereoautograph

DMJ – The Stereoautograph

Pablo Garcia

The Zeiss Stereoautograph 1914 Bild II is a mammoth device (Fig.1). It weighs over 400kg and has the same footprint as a Smart Car. When it was retired and donated to the Zeiss Archive in 2004, the Technical University of Hanover had to remove part of its roof in order to lift… Read More

On Drawing

On Drawing

Raimund Abraham

A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More

Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris

Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris

Dibujantes CNT and Grand Marnier

Prompted by the publication of Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy’s text on Guy Debord’s situationist maps of Paris, a closer look at two ways to represent the experience of a city…

Guy Debord—An Art of War

Guy Debord—An Art of War

Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy

The following is an extract from the book Emmanuel Guy, Laurence Le Bras, and Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Guy Debord: Un Art de La Guerre (Editions Gallimard, 2013), pp. 92–96 published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Guy Debord: an art of war’, presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m going to get medieval on your ass!

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — I’m going to get medieval on your ass!

Adrian Dannatt

‘I’m going to get medieval on your ass!’ Any analogy between the hefty massing of the middle-ages and soi-disant Brutalism is here revived in the bold metal hinges of our garage door, worthy of some château fort. Likewise the solid lead parapet of the roof could well guard a fortress, if also reminiscent of the… Read More

Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines

Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines

John Chilton

I first encountered Heinz Isler’s thin reinforced concrete shells when I saw his presentation ‘Third Decade of Structural Shells’ at the thirtieth anniversary symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), in Madrid, in September 1989. This was the first time I saw his inspirational drawing ‘Natural Hills on… Read More

The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review

The Renewal of Dwelling (2023) – Review

Rodrigo Lino Gaspar

Dwelling is on the political and architectural agenda of every European country in response to the rise of private housing development investment which has dominated the free market in the last decades, transforming cities and creating a new form of housing crisis. The Renewal of Dwelling. European Housing Construction 1945-75… Read More

Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers

Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Keep digging and you will find what you are looking for: Alvar Aalto in Germany

Keep digging and you will find what you are looking for: Alvar Aalto in Germany

Sofia Singler

In 1957, Alvar Aalto gave a speech in Munich entitled ‘Schöner Wohnen’.[1] He referred to his own design, the Hansaviertel apartment block in Berlin—his first project in Germany—as he described the key concerns in the design of the modern dwelling. (The construction of Aalto’s second German project, the Neue Vahr… Read More

Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once

Upper Lawn Pavilion: Strategy and Detail, Drawing / Feeling everything at once

Stephen Bates

In this film Stephen Bates discusses a group of drawings by Alison and Peter Smithson for the Upper Lawn Pavilion, dating from the late 1950s when the Smithsons bought the site, and the 1970s when the architects proposed several alterations—only some of which were realised. Stephen Bates’ relationship with the… Read More

Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review

Owen Jones and the V&A (2023) and Style and Solitude (2023) – Review

Adrian Forty

Now remembered almost only for The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones, architect, designer, writer, publisher was regarded in his lifetime as one of the greats of British architectural and design culture, up with Pugin and Ruskin. Yet of his prolific output of some 60 buildings and interior schemes, nine… Read More

DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective

DMJ — Of Lines Terrestrial and Occult: Friedrich Gilly, Alberto Sartoris, Adolphe Appia, and the Matter of Perspective

Ross Anderson

This essay discusses three enigmatic one-point perspective drawings. The first was made by the precocious Prussian architect and teacher Friedrich Gilly, the second by Alberto Sartoris as a young student of architecture in Geneva, and the third by the relatively unknown modern Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia. These drawings have been… Read More

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review

Portals: The Visionary Architecture of Paul Goesch (2023) – Review

Stan Allen

Paul Goesch was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital and, in 1940, murdered by the Nazis. Looking at these intense, yet often playful and exuberant drawings, it is impossible to forget the stark facts of his life. Which is unfortunate, because an exclusive attention to his personal history imposes a… Read More

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman

Andrew Carr

Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More