Period: c21st

Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery

Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery

Luis Callejas and Julia Spackman

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

An Interview with David Connor

An Interview with David Connor

Gianni Botsford and David Connor

* Gianni Botsford (GB): What I said that I could talk to you about is where it all started for you, how you learned to draw,  where your drawing method came from, and how it developed over time. David Connor (DC): I did start to draw when I was 4 or 5, which would… Read More

DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier 

DMJ – Notes on Derek Boshier 

Lucas Zurdo

Derek Boshier’s 16 Situations (1971) could be experienced both in print and as an installation. The exhibition, which toured from early 1971 before being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in September and October 1973, was simple in concept: the viewer followed a wall with 16 altered photographic images, each one with the… Read More

What’s in a Detail? 

What’s in a Detail? 

Enrico Miglietta

The following text appears in the recently published book The Drawing and the Space: Reflections on 10 Years of Design Research and Education, edited by Thierry Lagrange, Jo Van Den Berghe, Enrico Miglietta, and Liselotte Vroman. The book brings together a decade of work developed through design research and pedagogical… Read More

The House Without Character

The House Without Character

Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song

Ever since I first encountered Arnulf Rainer’s Overpaintings in an exhibition, I was captivated by them. In 1954, he started to draw with oil crayons over photographs of himself, directly and spontaneously reacting to his own image. They are extremely powerful and honest, revealing a fundamental truth that photography on… Read More

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Lina Malfona

‘The drawing represents the medianic exploration of the shaded side of reason and, contradictorily, the scene of an ideal landscape in which the architect believes he will be happy. As the place of theoretical truth, the drawing institutes itself independently of architecture. Superior to architecture by the fact that it… Read More

Reclaiming the Visual in Architectural Theory

Reclaiming the Visual in Architectural Theory

Manfredo di Robilant

Among the most influential books of architectural theory in the last three centuries is the Essai sur l’Architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier, published in 1753. The book’s goal was to establish the foundational principles of architecture, and thus the rules for designing proper buildings. The author argued that these rules descend… Read More

A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage

A Palimpsest in Line: A Graphic Biography of the Hasselt Beguinage

Koenraad Van Cleempoel and Joshua Kempen

The revitalisation of the Hasselt Beguinage and its transformation into the Faculty of Architecture and Arts has created an opportunity to reconsider the role of drawing as a critical mode of inquiry in adaptive reuse. Rather than treating drawing as a purely representational tool, the project frames it as an… Read More

Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 

Atlas of Seyðisfjörður 

Anna Eglite

This collection of drawings documents a series of studies undertaken in the town of Seyðisfjörður in East Iceland. I first visited the town in the autumn of 2020. A few hours after I left, a landslide destroyed a large part of it. Although landslides have become more frequent in our… Read More

Models of Models: The House Transformed

Models of Models: The House Transformed

Kyle Miller

The house is architecture’s most overdetermined subject. It carries the weight of every disciplinary trope, cultural norm, political aspiration, and sentimental projection that can be placed on a building. To approach it critically—and to argue that its conventions have been an instrument of exclusion rather than a neutral container—is itself… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)

BOLLES+WILSON: Drawing Towards Building (Exhibition + Talk)

Editors

On Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 July, Drawing Matter presented an exhibition of drawings by BOLLES+WILSON (founded in London in 1980; based in Münster since 1988). The exhibition was the fourth in a series presenting the work of architects and practices that are represented in the Drawing Matter Collection by significant portfolios… Read More

DMJ – Storytelling by Omission: On Dixon Jones’s ‘Selective Axonometrics’

DMJ – Storytelling by Omission: On Dixon Jones’s ‘Selective Axonometrics’

Adam Sharr

Architectural drawings tell stories through what they omit as much as what they depict. This article explores the role of thoughtful omission in axonometric drawing through two drawings made by British practice Dixon Jones Architects from the 1990s. While architectural practice has come to favour photorealistic representations that present a… Read More

Drawing Motion as Thought

Drawing Motion as Thought

MRND

A design (can) begin in the domain of the barely articulate, where drawing operates less as representation than as an instrument for sensing forces that precede form. The early sketches that remain unseen—those made without the burden of explanation—constitute a theoretical ground in which motion is not depicted but pursued.… Read More

Figuring Out

Figuring Out

Issi Nanabeyin

OneThe cycle begins almost accidentally. Quick marks in the margins of books, scribbles hidden on the back of documents: these are selfless lines made on the nearest surface while talking aloud to others. They carry the residue of whatever the mind was working through at that moment. Their importance is… Read More

Cartography of a Wound

Cartography of a Wound

Laura del Pino

How do you draw a diamond mine? How do you depict a wound on the terrain, a spiral of extraction so powerful that it reorganises entire territories? On the sheet, the mine becomes a self-contained world—a floating territory of pits, conveyor belts, processing sheds, and housing blocks—but it also acts… Read More

Three Drawings

Three Drawings

atelier local

This first drawing is not ours. It is a clumsy sketch that clients brought to our first meeting. Although not particularly legible, let alone well-proportionated, it carried the noble ambition of speaking about many things at once: it addressed everything, everywhere, all at once. Close inspection revealed three floor plans,… Read More

Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 

Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 

Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle

The following conversation between Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle, publishing director at RIBA, was conducted on 30 December 2021 and has been adapted from a text, originally presented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (Routledge, 2023). It traces the development of Cantley’s experimental drawing practice through Form:uLA—a body of work sustained since… Read More

Yes, And

Yes, And

Emily White

Tina Fey’s First Rule of Improvisation goes like this: If we’re improvising and I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun,’ and you say, ‘That’s not a gun. It’s your finger…’ our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun!’ and you say,… Read More

Time Theft

Time Theft

Jamie Lipson

* Jamie Lipson is a Canadian artist and architect. He received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Travelling Fellowship and Alpha Rho Chi medal. His son Orion turns 2 in July. This text is one of the selected responses to the… Read More

A Suite for the Absent Addressee

A Suite for the Absent Addressee

Oyat Shukurov

Prelude Construction has ceased abruptly. The inertia of instruction persists. When drawing is deprived of an addressee, the drift between the prescriptive and the descriptive intensifies. Act I: Villa Consider Villa Pisani Placco by Andrea Palladio, built for Francesco Pisani between 1552 and 1555 in Montagnana. Three elements are of interest:… Read More

Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper

Atlases: Drawings on Newspaper

Paolo Conrad-Bercah

My drawings are done on an unusual medium: newspapers. Around 2016, I began to draw on news–paper to try to counteract that inescapable status of newspapers themselves: conveying daily words that are often forgotten the next day, a condition reflected in an idiom of the English language—yesterday’s paper—used to refer… Read More

OPEN-GROUND 

OPEN-GROUND 

Daniel Jacobs and Brittany Utting

Architecture often treats the surface of the Earth as a liminal plane to break and excavate, cut and fill, and ultimately smooth into a neutral line. Even one of architecture’s most geological of drawing types, the worm’s-eye, typically eradicates any vestiges of earthly matters, reducing the underworld to an empty… Read More

DMJ – SMS to Eternity

DMJ – SMS to Eternity

Peter Wilson

Marlon and Elvis lived on opposite sides of Cutlers Wood.They were friends.They were immortal.One day Marlon sent Elvis an SMS: Marlon – Hey Elvis, cool cat, why don’t we see each other more often,We could talk about that geek Warhol who put us here! Elvis – Sure, but I am scared to… Read More

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

Manuel Orazi

‘In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection’ —Andrei Tarkovsky Italian culture has always produced artists who were attardé, either… Read More