Period: c21st

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital

Sylvia Lavin

What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Instagram, Indifference, and Postcritique in US Architectural Discourse

Joseph Bedford

The following text is reproduced from The Hybrid Practitioner: Building, Teaching, Researching Architecture (2022), edited by Caroline Voet, Eireen Schreurs, and Helen Thomas. The publication is available in print or as an ebook, here. You can find Joseph Bedford on Instagram here. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many architects… Read More

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Alberto Ponis: Studio di Yasmin

Team SHICHAI拾柴

This is the first of a series of posts pairing films made by team SHICHAI拾柴 with drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. The films, of houses designed by Alberto Ponis on Sardinia, were made for the exhibition ‘Drawing Landscape: Alberto Ponis,’ exhibited at Tongji University, Shanghai, 10 April—20 May 2023.… Read More

Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review

Material Reform, Building for a Post-Carbon Future (2023) – Review

Elke Krasny

Have you ever considered where your architecture comes from? That is, where the materials that form your home are from and have been produced. Many would be hard-pressed to give an answer to this question. With our connections to materials severed and very little known about the soils and lands… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Gap and Sign

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Gap and Sign

Adrian Dannatt

When my parents bought the house in 1955—for £1,000—one of the first things Trevor did was design this distinctive gap in the wall of the front garden, a modest modernist castle crenelation. This was deliberately aligned with the edge of the house, on a line with the front steps, so… Read More

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

Tania Garduño Israde

In 2003, at the troubled age of eighteen, I started a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. The first semester was a disappointment, a disaster even. The extremely hierarchical and academic system in Italy was terribly discouraging for creativity and questioning. By raising your hand to… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: weight

Nuno Melo Sousa: weight

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. They dance.They stand.They stare.They bend.They underline.They comply.They don’t comply.They question.They agree.They dismiss.They provoke.They ignore. Each and every one of them keeps a continuous movement between what… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

Nuno Melo Sousa: on big papers

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. First, there were a couple of tense drawings.One, two, three. At the very third second, it quickly escalated to a nonstop dry pastel scratch on A2… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: authority

Nuno Melo Sousa: authority

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. there is no authority.there is no gravity.there is no fee.there is no programme.there is no agenda.there is no time.there is no client.there is no plot. Creatures.… Read More

On Authority

On Authority

Nuno Melo Sousa

Following our recent series with fala we decided to approach some other practices who have themselves developed their design process through particular drawing ‘types’, challenging our expectation of the usage and forms traditionally associated with drawing in an architecture studio. We are very grateful to fala for introducing us to Nuno Melo Sousa… Read More

Architects at Play (2023) – Review

Architects at Play (2023) – Review

Mathilde de Laage

What is the reason for playing if not to weave relationships with the world? How can creative postures emerge from playing? Originating at the CIVA in Brussels, 2020 and then on show at the Garagem Sul in Lisbon, 2021, the exhibition ‘Architects at Play’, will spend the spring of 2023… Read More

Nuno Melo Sousa: in cahiers

Nuno Melo Sousa: in cahiers

Nuno Melo Sousa

This text is a part of a series of reflections by Nuno Melo Sousa on his drawing practices. Click here for the series introduction. As we travel, sitting, walking, flying, and running, we can look at the world.As we sit, eating, we can look at a small cahier also sitting,… Read More

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