Period: c21st

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

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

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

Koenraad Van Cleempoel and Joshua Kempen

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The House Without Character

Protected: The House Without Character

Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

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

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

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

Unknown Hands

Unknown Hands

Molnár Szabolcs

The visual material presented here comes from an early phase of House of Fire, an installation created by Studio Paradigma Ariadné for the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennale—long before the exhibition reached its final form. These images were never intended for display. They were test pieces, fragments, unsuccessful experiments, photocopies of photocopies:… Read More

Mapping Water

Mapping Water

Anna Biza

Some years ago, I travelled to Egypt and visited the Suez Canal—the international water passage that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. While standing on a small pier in Ismailia, I watched the huge cargo ships passing; the canal seemed more like a water highway. At the same time,… Read More

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

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

Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Unseen Bodies

Unseen Bodies

Christine Bjerke

This drawing explores how the human body has been depicted, understood, and imagined in Danish architectural and design education over the past 270 years. It represents a study of more than two hundred public and private archival materials sourced from various contemporary educational institutions, libraries, and archives across Denmark.[1] The… Read More

The Primacy of Drawing

The Primacy of Drawing

Roger Malbert

The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge’s magisterial survey of the place of drawing in European art since the Renaissance, was first published by Yale University Press in 2010. Weighing in at 520 pages, it was a formidable achievement of vast erudition and profound insight, the fruits of more than two… Read More

DMJ – Show

DMJ – Show

Freddie Phillipson

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where? James Joyce, Ulysses 17.2328-32 [1] Night-time on Eccles Street. Someone is half-dreaming of a mythical bird—a roc—in the Arabian… Read More

The Right to Imagine: Michael Sorkin’s Visual Argument

The Right to Imagine: Michael Sorkin’s Visual Argument

Marina Correia

On the wall of the third-floor mezzanine of the Spitzer School of Architecture of The City College of New York (CCNY) hangs a wood model titled Urbanagram. It was the product of a collaboration of students of the Master’s in Urban Design Program, directed for almost two decades by Michael Sorkin… Read More

Concept of Proof

Concept of Proof

Beth George

We talk of the invisible drawings that birth a project, but words persistently catalyse and crystallise thought, providing spur or anchor for the meandering of mind and hand in the extrication of architectures. Publication, specification, contract, critique—words. Our history and very conceptual frameworks rely on the productive and ‘dangerous inversions… Read More

Protected: Up in the Air: The Heygate and Aylesbury Estates

Protected: Up in the Air: The Heygate and Aylesbury Estates

Holly Smith

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Stan Allen

The first thing to be said about the drawings of Carlos Bedoya is that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, or a case for the lost art of drawing by hand. The architects of PRODUCTORA work in the present, with all the tools and techniques available to them. The… Read More

Protected: Surveying Sierra Nevada

Protected: Surveying Sierra Nevada

Alejandro Morales Martín

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Printed Matters 

Printed Matters 

Maria Mitsoula

Few objects stage anticipation as effectively as a box, especially one whose contents are revealed slowly, piece by piece. The sense of something concealed within prepares the viewer for an experience at once intimate and tactile, one that is focused by the box itself, but that—in the act of unpacking—becomes… Read More

Protected: Figuring Out

Protected: Figuring Out

Issi Nanabeyin

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Siza on Paper (Exhibition + Talk)

Siza on Paper (Exhibition + Talk)

Editors

On Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 March, Drawing Matter presented an exhibition of drawings by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. The exhibition focused on Siza as a designer of public housing after the Carnation Revolution (1974) and his approaches to drawing. At the centre of the exhibition were three housing… Read More

Drawing Superpositions

Drawing Superpositions

Leo Julin

When drawing plans for a project that does not primarily form architectural space through solid mass, the question of what a line signifies becomes especially critical. This drawing faced the challenge of representing an object that produces light and sound, situated in the public space of Vårby Gård, a suburb… Read More