Period: c21st

Impressions of the Siza Exhibition

Impressions of the Siza Exhibition

Sergio Kopinski Ekerman

When I was an architecture exchange student at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto (FAUP), between 2000 and 2001, there was a legend you could knock at Álvaro Siza Vieira’s office door and end up working there as an intern—the equivalent of walking into Mount Olympus to collaborate with… Read More

Protected: Site Drawing: GPS on Architecture

Protected: Site Drawing: GPS on Architecture

Anton Ripon

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and Interpretation in Staging a Museum

Fuglsang Kunstmuseum: Facts and Interpretation in Staging a Museum

Tony Fretton

The following text was first published in OASE #111: Staging the Museum (2022). Drawing Matter would like to thank Tony Fretton and the issue’s editors Aslı Çiçek, Jantje Engels, and Maarten Liefooghe, for allowing us to reproduce the text. Purchase a copy of OASE #111 here. Fuglsang Kunstmuseum is located on the… Read More

PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an Ideo-aesthetic Technique

PostDigital Collage: Naivety as an Ideo-aesthetic Technique

Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo

It was 2005, a moment of crescent belief in technical progress and modernity prior to the upcoming financial crisis that took place two years later. The early 2000s saw the progressive implementation of photorealistic modes of architectural representation through which firms were able to intensify the instrumentalisation of spatial design.… Read More

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney

Fabrizio Gallanti

Drawing Matter asked Fabrizio Gallanti, Director of the arc en rêve – centre d’architecture, for an informal commentary on the content and presentation of their current exhibition L’architecture des réalités mises en scene: (re)construire Disney, open until January 2025. We are arc en rêve. We do exhibitions. In Bordeaux, South-West of France.… Read More

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

Sayan Skandarajah

There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More

Drawing Without Erasing

Drawing Without Erasing

Ricardo Flores

The following text first appeared in Drawing without Erasing and Other Essays, by Flores & Prats (Barcelona: Puente editores, 2023), 16-23. Not so long ago, a journalist interviewed us for the British magazine Architecture Today, and the resulting article was called ‘Dirty Drawings’. This suggestive title might bring to mind a… Read More

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World

Photo City: How Images Shape the Urban World

Fabrizio Gallanti

A long time before the surge of the Internet and the diffusion of portable devices connected to it, seeping into our eyes incessant flows of images, the relationship of people to their surroundings was profoundly altered by photography, and then cinema. The carefully curated exhibition Photo City: How Images Shape the… Read More

Streetscapes: Bath

Streetscapes: Bath

Ptolemy Dean

The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More

2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models

2024 Architecture Summer School: Translations between drawings and models

Jesper Authen and Matt Page

Drawing is the act of translating a thought to a mark on the page—where the hand is in conversation with the mind. This conversation is marked by an unbridgeable gap between the idea and the output—sometimes betraying and exposing the thought, and other times surprising you with an unintended vigour… Read More

DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office

DMJ – Sir John Soane’s Office

Helen Dorey

Sir John Soane’s drawing offices at Nos 12 and 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the fulcrum of his practice between 1794 and his retirement in 1833. His unique surviving ‘upper’ office was restored in 2022–23. In this article, I will trace the history of the office and recount its use… Read More

Suddenly This View

Suddenly This View

Drawing Architecture Studio

Suddenly This View begun as a series of architectural models and evolved into a collection of model photography. It is an ongoing project investigating everyday spaces, exploring how architectural models and their derivative creations can be used to convey spatial narratives. The subjects of Suddenly This View are everyday buildings… Read More

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows

Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows

Holger Kleine and Anna Kostreva

‘The architecture of agency is the architecture of the cemetery. The power to change is the power to say goodbye.’ (Epigraph, Seeing Fire | Seeing Meadows) ‘The cemetery is a place made for the living to spatialize their emotions; certain things can happen there that can’t happen in other places.’… Read More

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Fernanda Canales

My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

Adolfo Natalini with Superstudio at Drawing Matter

James Dunbar and Editors

Adolfo Natalini (1941–2020) was an Italian architect. A member of the ‘School of Pistoia’ Pop Art group in the early 1960s, Natalini combined his Pop aesthetic with critique and irony in his thesis work at the University of Florence School of Architecture, graduating in 1966.[1] Soon after, he co-founded Superstudio… Read More

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 2

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 2

Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson

This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More

Shatwell Farm: Covering Over, Bagging Up, Tying Down

Shatwell Farm: Covering Over, Bagging Up, Tying Down

Emily Priest

This text is the fourth in a series of studies of Shatwell Farm made by Emily Priest while staying on site in September 2023. Tarpaulin has its origins in 17th-century maritime communities. Sailors, who were nicknamed ‘tarpaulins’, used to sleep on decks under hard-wearing fabrics which were impregnated with tar- as a… Read More

DMJ – Burning Drawing

DMJ – Burning Drawing

Paddi Alice Benson

This article documents a series of material studies of prepared surfaces that use laser cutters as instruments of drawing—and, at times, of weathering. They are part of a study that explores, through texts and images, the role that islands have played as topoi of imagination and experimentation. I begin these island stories… Read More

The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition

The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition

Juan Fernández González

The GSD Sketching Group brings together the Harvard Graduate School of Design community to explore and sketch their surroundings. This student group was founded in February 2022 by Olivia Champ Tremml and myself, with the goal of dignifying hand drawing within the design professions and to strengthen its relevance in… Read More

Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action

Hermann Czech: Approximate Line of Action

Mikael Bergquist

Hermann Czech: Ungefähre Hauptrichtung (Approximate Line of Action) is on show at Fanz-Josef-Kai 3, Vienna, from 16 March – 9 June, 2024. On 15 March 2024, an exhibition on the Austrian architect Hermann Czech’s work opened in Vienna at the exhibition space Franz-Josefs-Kai 3 (fJk3). It is the first retrospective… Read More

DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation

DMJ – Instruments of Uncertain Occupation

Nat Chard

Architecture is a promiscuous practice that touches and learns from many other disciplines. Architects have associated their studies with other specialisations in the sciences, arts and humanities and many of the aspects of architectural education draw upon and defer to those realms. To make architecture one needs to gather ideas… Read More

Sugimoto and Architecture

Sugimoto and Architecture

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The early twentieth century saw a multifaceted blossoming of the avant-garde in Europe, with Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl… These movements also had an influence on architecture. Until the nineteenth century, people’s way of living was centred around religion. Much architectural decoration was developed in order to express the magnificence… Read More

Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

Sugimoto and Architecture: A Conversation between David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

David Chipperfield and Ralph Rugoff

This interview is excerpted from the catalogue of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, which was on show at the Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October 2023 – 07 January 2024, and is touring to UCCA Beijing and MCA Australia. Copies of the catalogue can be purchased here. Ralph Rugoff: Hiroshi Sugimoto has… Read More

Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)

Design Drawings Damage Atlas (2023)

Neil Bingham

Snap, crackle, pop. Oh, that horrible sound of unravelling a roll of architectural drawings on old dried-up tracing paper from the nineteenth century. Slowly unfurling the brown brittle sheet, it cracks and shatters, little bits drop off in flakes, littering the table and floor like confetti. The experience feels like… Read More