Period: c20th
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review
12.04.2023
Avant-Garde as Method, Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920 – 1930 (2020) – Review12.04.2023
Much of the research for this book was consolidated for Anna Bokov’s PhD at Yale, but it is clear that she had been exploring the issues throughout her career, from the Moscow Architectural Institute to Syracuse University to Harvard, before Yale. The acknowledgments include many well-known luminaries in the USA,… Read More
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review
10.04.2023
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 10.04.2023
Climbing the majestic double staircase of the Palau de la Virreina, a building that hovers somewhere between the Baroque and the Rococo, one arrives at a small but intense exhibition on show at [La Virreina] Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona. Curated by María García Ruiz and Moisés Puente, it presents… Read More
Abelardo Morell
06.04.2023
Abelardo Morell06.04.2023
In 2006 Abelardo Morell was invited by a collector with a Palazzo in Venice to photograph a camera obscura image of the Grand Canal in his mother’s bedroom. Morell returned to the city a year later. His host, pointing at a window in a Canaletto painting, said he knew a… Read More
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée
03.04.2023
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée03.04.2023
This text is excerpted from Aldo Rossi. Insulae, edited by Nadejda Bartels, a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, run by the Tchoban Foundation (on display from 4 February – 14 May 2023). Drawing represented for Aldo Rossi the privileged… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31.03.2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31.03.2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect
27.03.2023
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect27.03.2023
The fact that Álvaro Siza did not write about his work or about architecture is a conscious gesture, which goes beyond the mere neutrality of city walls. What is important in Siza is not the end result or the work, hence his lack of comment. His manner, his alibis, his… Read More
Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School
22.03.2023
Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School22.03.2023
This project scrapbook traces the publication and exhibition history of Richard Neutra’s experimental Corona Avenue School, built in 1935 after the Los Angeles earthquake of 1933. The material for this scrapbook has been compiled by Nicholas Olsberg; his earlier text on the school for Drawing Matter can be read here.
Nancy Goldring: Drawings and Foto-Projections
17.03.2023
Nancy Goldring: Drawings and Foto-Projections17.03.2023
– Leann Davis Alspaugh and Nancy Goldring
The following interview is reproduced from the publication Distillations: Nancy Goldring, Drawings and Foto-Projections, 1971–2021, published by ORO Editions. The interview was conducted by Leann Davis Alspaugh for The Hedgehog Review. The Hedgehog Review: In the 2014 summer issue of The Hedgehog Review, we ran two of your works ‘The… Read More
Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more
13.03.2023
Protected: Collection News: Binazzi and UFO, Burton, Gounod, Siza, Visconti and more13.03.2023
– Editors
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Construct
13.03.2023
Construct13.03.2023
In 1975, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) produced two projects for Roosevelt Island (formerly Welfare Island), in New York’s East River, between Manhattan and Queens. The thin sliver of land—historically treated as ‘a storehouse for “undesirables”’ [1]—was undergoing a process of redevelopment under the New York State Urban Development… Read More
Ghost Parking Lot
10.03.2023
Ghost Parking Lot10.03.2023
SITE, an architecture and environmental art group, was founded in 1970 for the purpose of exploring new ways to bring a heightened level of communication and psychological content to buildings, interiors, and public spaces. Originally organised to research, assemble, and publish international documentation on other artists and architects of similar… Read More
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History
03.03.2023
DMJ – Asphalt Tales and the Ends of History03.03.2023
This paper explores how asphalt became a medium for architects and artists from the late 1950s to the 1970s to raise and articulate questions about memory, oblivion, communication and the environment. It questions to what extent T.J. Demos’ recent assertion that experimental visual culture is embedded ‘within social engagements and… Read More
DMJ – Shallow Cuts: The Geological Sectioning of Newcastle, NSW
03.03.2023
DMJ – Shallow Cuts: The Geological Sectioning of Newcastle, NSW03.03.2023
This paper charts the emergence of the drawn section as a mode of documenting geological time and physical space. This is specifically mapped in the Antipodean context of colonisation, where vital resources underneath the ground were mediated with strategic ambitions above. The relatively small period in the history of the… Read More
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk
01.03.2023
Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk01.03.2023
This is the final 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’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality
24.02.2023
Alison and Peter Smithson’s Collages as Reinventing Established Reality24.02.2023
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
21.02.2023
Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review21.02.2023
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
About Malagueira: Siza’s Poem on Page 27 of Sketchbook 01
20.02.2023
About Malagueira: Siza’s Poem on Page 27 of Sketchbook 0120.02.2023
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
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff
17.02.2023
Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff17.02.2023
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
15.02.2023
In the Archive: de la Fuente, Unknown, OMA, Ellwood and Ponis15.02.2023
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
13.02.2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13.02.2023
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
Materia 5: Timber
18.04.2023
Materia 5: Timber18.04.2023
– Gordon Shrigley
This text is the final instalment 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. The language of architectural drawing, although appearing to promise an infinite arena for self-projection, ultimately fails to contain and express… Read More
section projection (axonometric isometric) detail materia (editorial series)