Period: c21st

Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection

Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection

Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula

The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More

Protected: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture

Protected: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture

William Firebrace

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Time Theft

Protected: Time Theft

Jamie Lipson

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Baroqsysms

Baroqsysms

Edgar Papazian

Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More

And in the shadows, the section fades

And in the shadows, the section fades

Charlotte Erckrath

On the black cartridge, a veil of pigments builds up, articulates an edge and fades into the depth. And yet it is the edge that meets me first, together with all the other edges that are layered upon each other. Cascading contrasts of white and black. Or: of brightness and darkness. Now… Read More

Protected: Drawing Superpositions

Protected: Drawing Superpositions

Leo Julin

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Sam Jacob: On Collage (Talk, Workshop + Exhibition)

Sam Jacob: On Collage (Talk, Workshop + Exhibition)

Editors

In early February, Drawing Matter organised a series of public events with the architect Sam Jacob exploring the uses of collage in architectural representations. On the Friday (6 February), Sam gave a talk on his personal interests in collage, weaving a narrative from Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that… Read More

Massinissa Selmani 

Massinissa Selmani 

Roger Malbert

The nomination of the Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani for the 2023 Prix Marcel Duchamp was an official acknowledgement that a practice grounded primarily in pencil drawing on paper on a modest scale can constitute a major contribution to contemporary art.[1] In Selmani’s abbreviated aesthetic, weighty ideas are carried by the… Read More

DMJ – Death Masks

DMJ – Death Masks

Kieran Cremin

This series of drawings is part of a larger project titled Tracking Blood Meridian, which explores the work of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. The sketchbook pages are developed as studies for landscape-like death masks that relate to members of the nineteenth-century Glanton gang, on whose exploits McCarthy’s 1985 novel… Read More

Levers Long Enough to Move the World

Levers Long Enough to Move the World

Andrew Holder

‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’ — Archimedes Levers Long Enough to Move the World is an exhibition of architectural sketches curated by Andrew Holder at the Pratt School of Architecture, featuring the work of 62 contemporary… Read More

Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza

Collection Guide: Álvaro Siza

Editors

At Drawing Matter, I had long hoped that we could play some part in the transition of the Álvaro Siza archive from his personal holdings to the public realm. Ten years ago, over many meetings with Siza, Nicholas Olsberg and I had agreed that the collection at Drawing Matter might… Read More

Chatter: Richard Wentworth with Roger Malbert, Rowan Moore and Marina Warner (Video)

Chatter: Richard Wentworth with Roger Malbert, Rowan Moore and Marina Warner (Video)

Editors

Drawing Matter’s 2026 Public Programme launched with Chatter, an informal evening that encouraged conversation around drawings and objects from the collection. For Chatter #1, we collaborated with the artist Richard Wentworth to select drawings and objects that relate to his work and interests. For the evening, material from different contexts,… Read More

Engraving Shadows

Engraving Shadows

Anne Desmet

In all relief printmaking techniques such as woodcut (in which cuts are made along the plank of a smooth piece of wood) and linocut (involving, like woodcuts, steel gouges with U- and V-shaped cutting tips), as well as wood engraving and even the humble potato-cut, what you leave uncut on… Read More

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Nicholas Ray

Open any book by a Dutch architect and you are bound to come across H. P. Berlage—the forefather from whom sprang everything, albeit indirectly, from the Amsterdam School to Der Stijl and who is revered for his contribution at all scales from the details of his buildings to his town… Read More

John Hejduk, Object/Subject Riga

John Hejduk, Object/Subject Riga

Hélène Binet

I began photographing John Hejduk’s work at the beginning of my interest in photography, when I knew little about his work and about architecture in general. Yet photographing John Hejduk came to me in a very natural way. His work, being so unique, had no visual references, and that gave… Read More

Architecture that Does not Perform

Architecture that Does not Perform

Benni Allan

A trip with our studio EBBA to Cambridge for our Christmas party resurfaced a familiar feeling. Moving through the city with its colleges, courts, libraries and streets, it became apparent how often architects expect things to perform. Buildings are read for what they signify, how clearly they express an idea… Read More

Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos

Heinrich Kulka and Adolf Loos

Giles Reid

On 7th July 2025, an exhibition dedicated to architect Heinrich Kulka opened at the Ringturm Exhibition Centre in Vienna, titled Heinrich Kulka (1900–1971) – The Spatial Plan as a Design Method, focusing on Kulka’s European work, both with Adolf Loos and as an independent architect. It was curated by architect and writer… Read More

On Measurement: A Survey of Florence

On Measurement: A Survey of Florence

Mojan Kavosh

The following text is an extract from a longer essay entitled ‘De re mensura: Surveying Practice in Quattrocento Painting’—which the author completed at the Warburg Institute in the autumn of 2025—looking at Renaissance perspective painting to consider how practices of surveying informed the development of perspective as an artistic and intellectual pursuit. *… Read More

Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer

Tracing Shadows: A Workshop Primer

Mark Dorrian

Here, Mark Dorrian examines the theoretical history of the shadow and its evolving role in architectural drawing. The text acts as a word-and-image primer for the third colloquium event, jointly hosted by the RIBA and V&A Drawings Collections, and Drawing Matter, which will take place later this month—a day of… Read More

DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight

DMJ – The Story of the Raft: Architectural Narrations of Disaster, Despair and Delight

Willem de Bruijn

Architectural stories, almost by definition, construct narratives combining image and text. It is these combinations of the visual and the verbal that make architectural stories particularly compelling and memorable. ‘The Story of the Pool’ (1976) by Rem Koolhaas is a case in point. The script, written by Koolhaas, tells of… Read More

To Table

To Table

Sara Gohberg

To table is to create the conditions for collective presence through food, space, event, and ritual; it is to host a gathering where practices and events—ranging from the everyday to the ceremonial, the spontaneous to the planned—become acts of social meaning-making. Also, as a verb, ‘to table’ conventionally carries a dual… Read More

This is Tomorrow 

This is Tomorrow 

Tess McCann

The following text is excerpted from the catalogue of the exhibition Theo Crosby: One Hundred Lives, which is on view at Osh Gallery London until the 11th December 2025. Curated by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and researcher Tess McCann, the exhibition focuses on the life and work of Theo Crosby, one of the founding… Read More

Drawings of Architectures

Drawings of Architectures

Primitivo González and Niall Hobhouse

The exhibition Drawings of Architectures brings together Primitivo González’s private collection of original architectural drawings, sketches and notes, which González has been collecting for more than twenty-five years. The exhibition, designed by Ara, Noa and Primitivo González, includes drawings from Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Rafael Moneo, and Emilio Tuñón, among others, and is presented at the Patio Herreriano Museum in… Read More

The Architect of Impossible Physics

The Architect of Impossible Physics

Edward Bowen

More than once, when describing the processes involved in creating these drawings, my listener has responded with two words in particular: loading and channelling. I thought I would and should elaborate. The initial first gestures, lines, squiggles, scratches, smudges and randomisations of the mark making inform the start to the work in these… Read More