Period: c21st

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

Protected: Yes, And

Protected: Yes, And

Emily White

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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: OPEN-GROUND 

Protected: OPEN-GROUND 

Daniel Jacobs and Brittany Utting

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

Protected: Three Drawings

Protected: Three Drawings

atelier local

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

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: 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