Period: c20th
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality
24 February 2023
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality24 February 2023
Alison and Peter Smithson often introduced figures that were protagonists in the news, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, French actor Gérard Philipe, and the first prime minister of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru into their architectural drawings for social housing projects—as in the case of their collages for the… Read More
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review
21 February 2023
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review21 February 2023
Collected Works opens with a lecture that Adam Caruso and Peter St John gave at the Architecture Foundation in London, in 1998. The text sets the tone of the publication. As a reader, one is invited to enter the universe of two architects who are searching for their position in the… Read More
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff
17 February 2023
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff17 February 2023
This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More
In the Archive: de la Fuente, Unknown, OMA, Ellwood and Ponis
15 February 2023
In the Archive: de la Fuente, Unknown, OMA, Ellwood and Ponis15 February 2023
Click on drawings to move and enlarge. 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. I first found myself at Drawing Matter to view the voiles produced by the Chilean… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection
13 February 2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13 February 2023
Michael Sorkin, in Drawings for Sale, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator: ‘the drawing as artefact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture’. Sorkin argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator… Read More
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)
9 February 2023
Emilio Ambasz’s ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’ (1972)9 February 2023
– Editors
Late last year Emilio Ambasz offered us a fascinating text in which he reflects on ‘Italy, The New Domestic Landscape’, the seminal exhibition he curated in 1972 for MoMA. We have taken his text as an invitation to informally bring together drawings and objects related both to the exhibition and to the radical practices… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
3 February 2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work3 February 2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?
2 February 2023
Le Corbusier: The ‘Open hand’ as an expression of freedom?2 February 2023
Le Corbusier placed particular emphasis on the notion of freedom. In Où en est l’architecture?, he declares: ‘I accept a poem only if it is made of “words in freedom”’. [1] In the same text, Le Corbusier describes his conception of art as ‘individual manifestation of freedom’. [2] In Sur… Read More
Geography of Hope: John Lautner
31 January 2023
Geography of Hope: John Lautner31 January 2023
This is the second of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Suspension and Poise: Lautner at Mountainside The first photograph of John Lautner that we know, shows him as a boy of about fourteen, standing… Read More
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review
30 January 2023
Forecast and Fantasy: Architecture without Borders 1960s to 1980s – Review30 January 2023
This carefully curated and beautifully displayed exhibition brings together 150 drawings with numerous publications and films to display a wave of rebellion and research by architects across the European continent, with a focus on the east, over three decades. The abundance of visionary thinking that followed the boom of post-war… Read More
Historic England Image Archive
23 January 2023
Historic England Image Archive23 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio
18 January 2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18 January 2023
This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 1970
17 January 2023
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 197017 January 2023
Watch Philippa Lewis’s recent lecture, ‘From Drawing to Text’, on how we tell stories from architecture, for The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology here. Geoff Freeman, sales director of a Northamptonshire shoe company, arrives at JFK Airport for his flight… Read More
The Sasada Lab
16 January 2023
The Sasada Lab16 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
The ESB’s New Clothes
12 January 2023
The ESB’s New Clothes12 January 2023
In 1965 sixteen late-eighteenth-century houses on the east side of Fitzwilliam Street Lower, Dublin were demolished. They had served as headquarters of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and in their place was to be a new company HQ, a 1961 competition-winning scheme by the partnership of Sam Stephenson and Arthur… Read More
Materia 4: Brick
10 January 2023
Materia 4: Brick10 January 2023
This text is the fourth 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. Coarse rectangular lumps of clay mixed with straw and water, small enough to be carried in one or two hands, are laid… Read More
The City of Design
9 January 2023
The City of Design9 January 2023
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III
6 January 2023
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III6 January 2023
This is the final of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as a young architect in London and Dorset. As he… Read More
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair
5 January 2023
The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair5 January 2023
Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More
Owen Luder: Practice at Work
3 January 2023
Owen Luder: Practice at Work3 January 2023
The day-to-day workings of a practice such as OLP fall into two separate yet overlapping sectors: administration and job organisation. Unless these two are properly related and maintained, no amount of design talent, no amount of entrepreneurial vigour or personal charm will keep the practice alive and flourishing. For, despite… Read More
Drawing for James Stirling
20 December 2022
Drawing for James Stirling20 December 2022
Looking back forty years or so on my time in the basement of Jim Stirling’s office in Gloucester Place feels like travelling centuries. Today it is inconceivable that a world-renowned architect and Pritzker Laureate would show a client around the office wanting him to look at the equipment and be… Read More
Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here
15 December 2022
Beverly Buchanan: here I am; I’m still here15 December 2022
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
About Malagueira: Siza’s Poem on Page 27 of Sketchbook 01
20 February 2023
About Malagueira: Siza’s Poem on Page 27 of Sketchbook 0120 February 2023
– Rodrigo Lino Gaspar
The following translation proposed for Álvaro Siza’s writings on page 27 of his sketchbook 01 in Drawing Matter Collections is part of an ongoing investigation into the Malagueira project at DA/UAL PhD Programme in Contemporary Architecture. Siza’s sketchbooks are a precious tool for understanding his work and interpreting his concerns.… Read More
DMC nature creative writing translation