Period: c21st

Archive Politics

Archive Politics

Pedro Baía and Carlos Machado e Moura

The following text is an excerpt from ‘Archive Politics: Reflections based on Flashback / Carrilho da Graça’, a longer review published in Jornal Arquitectos 262 of ‘Flashback: Carrilho da Graça’, an exhibition of ten projects by João Luís Carrilho da Graça at Casa da Arquitectura, Matosinhos, (8 April 2022 – 29 January 2023), curated… Read More

Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell

Rebecca Connor Reading

In 2006 Abelardo Morell was invited by a collector with a Palazzo in Venice to photograph a camera obscura image of the Grand Canal in his mother’s bedroom. Morell returned to the city a year later. His host, pointing at a window in a Canaletto painting, said he knew a… Read More

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on construction drawings by architects architects and designers. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live in the Drawing… Read More

Nancy Goldring: Drawings and Foto-Projections

Nancy Goldring: Drawings and Foto-Projections

Leann Davis Alspaugh and Nancy Goldring

The following interview is reproduced from the publication Distillations: Nancy Goldring, Drawings and Foto-Projections, 1971–2021, published by ORO Editions. The interview was conducted by Leann Davis Alspaugh for The Hedgehog Review. The Hedgehog Review: In the 2014 summer issue of The Hedgehog Review, we ran two of your works ‘The… Read More

Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review

Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – review

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

‘Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future’ is an exhibition which, despite being in the small window gallery of the Building Centre in London, offers the visitor a chance to rethink the sources and uses of contemporary construction materials. Developed by curators Summer Islam, George Massoud, and Paloma Gormley of research-based architectural studio… Read More

Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine on the Moriyama House

Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine on the Moriyama House

What is a House For and Bêka & Lemoine

The editors of ‘What is a House For’ (Mateusz Zaluska, Riccardo Amarri, and Matthew Bailey) have kindly allowed Drawing Matter to reproduce the following interview with Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine, in which the filmmakers discuss the Moriyama House (2005) by Ryue Nishizawa, the subject of their 2017 film ‘Moriyama-San’.… Read More

Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review

Caruso St John Collected Works: Volume 1, 1990 – 2005 – Review

Sofie De Caigny

Collected Works opens with a lecture that Adam Caruso and Peter St John gave at the Architecture Foundation in London, in 1998. The text sets the tone of the publication. As a reader, one is invited to enter the universe of two architects who are searching for their position in the… Read More

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Ambiguous Drawings

Pier Vittorio Aureli: Ambiguous Drawings

Paco Alfaro Anguita

For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More

Letter of Authorisation to Discuss Late Ottoman Archive Drawings as Operational Images

Letter of Authorisation to Discuss Late Ottoman Archive Drawings as Operational Images

Ecem Arslanay and Mina Gürsel Tabanlıoğlu

Southeastern Turkey and Northern Syria have been struck by a 7.7 magnitude earthquake, followed by a 7.5 tremor, killing more than 46,000 people. Ecem and Mina’s local NGO is AHBAP. Please click here if you would like to make a donation. For the past two years, our Writing Prize has… Read More

Shed for Carolyn

Shed for Carolyn

George Gibbs

The drawing shown below was highly commended in the Working Drawing Award of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize 2022. The Working Drawing Award is a special category within the exhibition that celebrates the role of drawing within architecture, design and making processes. Context Shed for Carolyn was a project to rehabilitate… Read More

The City of Design

The City of Design

Emilio Ambasz

Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More

fala: butterflies

fala: butterflies

fala

This is the final of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Every discussion ends in a few drawn lines as words don’t do the job as well. A project is usually sketched between the lines that… Read More

The Garden Transcripts

The Garden Transcripts

Eleanor Evason

For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More

fala: photography

fala: photography

fala

This is the seventh of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. We photograph the construction site a few times, to keep a certain moment for later. When construction ends, we photograph it again, intensely. Not just… Read More

Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog

Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog

Joseph Heffernan

Every hectare of drained peatland emits two tonnes of carbon a year. Known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but they store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. Cutting turf for fuel has been practiced for centuries, and communities have… Read More

Open Letters: Harvard GSD

Open Letters: Harvard GSD

Paul Mosley

Drawing Matter has been enjoying Open Letters, published bi-weekly by Harvard University Graduate School Of Design, from the start. In part, this is because our own publishing initiative began at much at the same time – now ten years ago – and proceeds at the same pace, and with a little of the… Read More

fala: collages

fala: collages

fala

This is the sixth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. fala started with collages. An abundance of images populated the internet; at some point, an online presence was decidedly claimed. Collages were the closest we… Read More

From Afar

From Afar

Ajna Babahmetovic

During the first lockdown in 2020, from my bedroom in Graz, I began to model a small Bosnian town named Kozarac. The indefinite postponement of life, as it had seemed at the time, made space for such an ambitious task. Equipped only with a .dwg survey map of the city… Read More

fala: execution drawings

fala: execution drawings

fala

This is the fifth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Construction documents include an array of scales. General drawings, partials, maps, details, and indexes are loaded with intentions and manic descriptions. They are supposed to… Read More

Queensway, Hong Kong

Queensway, Hong Kong

Sony Devabhaktuni

What I knew of Hong Kong before I moved here came from film and photography. It was a dense, post-modern city that in earlier decades had been characterised by its economic success. Since the turn of the century, the city has been pummelled by shocks and anxieties. Life in Hong… Read More

fala: renders

fala: renders

fala

This is the fourth of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Low-resolution images are humble and straightforward. The textures are blunt and the colours are strong. Ambient occlusion is mostly off. Light, shadows and reflections are rarely under… Read More

How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing

How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing

Federica Goffi and Devon Moar

The bee drawing(s) by Devon Moar illustrate that changes in scale imply a passage of time. One drawing here becomes many drawings, each marking a different moment of discovery unfolding a process. One could say that when it comes to architectural media, there are two types of scales dealing with… Read More

fala: wireframes

fala: wireframes

fala

This is the third of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Wireframes are snapshots of three-dimensional models built solely from lines. Single-line plans and sections are extruded to form a light envelope. Its colours dismantle the… Read More

Fronts and Faces

Fronts and Faces

Lera Samovich

The paper is cut without measuring. Rulers and set squares are neglected. Scissors are preferred over cutters and cutting mats. Circles are traced from nearby cups and glasses. The lines are never quite parallel. The edges are askew and the angles are uncertain. Alignments, perfect geometries and round numbers are… Read More