Period: c21st

Protected: Unseen Bodies

Protected: Unseen Bodies

Christine Bjerke

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

Protected: An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

Manuel Orazi

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Philip Christou: 34 Drawings

Philip Christou: 34 Drawings

Freddie Phillipson

…a rigid adherence to a mathematical or logical system when forming a plan tends to make the design detached, mechanical and unresponsive to its site and surroundings—its situation—and make the building overly self-referential. However, when the regular system has cadence, is dynamic and can be disrupted or contaminated by the… Read More

Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture

Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture

William Firebrace

The following fictional text was extracted from William Firebrace’s Scaletales (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln, 2026). The book investigates the various meanings of the word scale through a story about two elderly women on a journey from Finland through central Europe to the Black Sea. They… Read More

Protected: Concept of Proof

Protected: Concept of Proof

Beth George

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The Incessant Power of Drawings

The Incessant Power of Drawings

Fabrizio Gallanti

We have come to doubt the real necessity of being exposed to original artefacts, as we find ourselves drowned in a deluge of endless reproductions. Why bother visiting galleries and museums when one can check stuff on the web? A picture of teenagers scrolling their cellphones in front of a… Read More

Protected: Mapping Water

Protected: Mapping Water

Anna Biza

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Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Stan Allen

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Drawing Motion as Thought

Protected: Drawing Motion as Thought

MRND

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Rewriting Eisenman

Rewriting Eisenman

Alexander Bala

In his new book Rewriting Alberti, Peter Eisenman applies the ‘most important lesson in architecture’ that he ever received to a study of the origin of the discipline in the Western tradition.[1] Standing at the fount of that tradition is the fifteenth-century Florentine scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti.[2] From… Read More

Tracing Air with Light

Tracing Air with Light

Xinyu Chen

When architects design buildings, they simultaneously construct environments for human habitation and activity. Whether through the warmth emanating from a hearth or the breeze generated by an air-conditioning unit, architecture is always implicated in the modulation of environmental conditions. However, environmental control—along with the elements that it seeks to temper—remains… Read More

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: 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

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