Period: c21st
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction
08.06.2022
The Ulysses Project: Architecture and the City through James Joyce’s Dublin: Introduction08.06.2022
This text introduces The Ulysses Project by architect Freddie Phillipson, his exploration of the relationship between the buildings of Dublin and James Joyce’s landmark novel. The drawings are on display at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin, from 17 June – 19 August 2022. The exhibition is part of Ulysses100, an international… Read More
Clancy Moore: Less is more
24.05.2022
Clancy Moore: Less is more24.05.2022
This linked text is part of an ongoing series that records the building projects undertaken at Shatwell Farm. For more on the Shatwell Project, click here.
Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm
03.05.2022
Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm03.05.2022
The following is an account of a visit to Drawing Matter in March 2022 made by Benjamin Machin and his students at the Loughborough School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering – Alina Abdulwahid, Nyewuna Amadi, Jemima Dabell, Beckie Downs, Lewis Foster-Jeapes, Will Jones, Will Mennell, Danielle Riley, Joe Tolley,… Read More
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence
07.04.2022
The Iterative Power of Architecture’s Absence07.04.2022
In 1991, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron prepared a submission with the artist Remy Zaugg for the Berlin Morgen (‘Berlin Tomorrow’) exhibition organised by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. By surrounding Berlin’s Tiergarten with four new buildings, they proposed to restructure the park – then perceived as… Read More
The Being of Drawing (2021) – Review
04.04.2022
The Being of Drawing (2021) – Review04.04.2022
Joe Graham’s The Being of Drawing is the most recent book published by Marmalade Publishers of Visual Theory, the small press founded by the architect Gordon Shrigley in 2004. Marmalade’s catalogue of published titles challenges expectations of what a publishing house might be; to date, it has produced 12 books,… Read More
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’
24.03.2022
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’24.03.2022
The provocation for this essay is Drawing Matter’s own: ‘we take the word “drawing” to be as much a verb as a noun…’ Drawing describes an act and a thing: both a process and the outcome of that process. There aren’t many English words like it, and many of them… Read More
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City
21.03.2022
Wood & Harrison: A Film About a City21.03.2022
– Paul Harrison and John Wood
We are not architects. I mean, if you insist, we could probably knock something up, but we are not that good at maths, and not really that great with materials. ‘Wood and Harrison – Architects. You’ll be knocked out by our buildings’. But we have always been interested in architecture.… Read More
Exhibition Design: Charging the Void
09.03.2022
Exhibition Design: Charging the Void09.03.2022
Last year at Cornell University, five students in Alessandra Cianchetta’s design studio Global Artscapes worked on designs for a gallery in the valley at Shatwell. For this, they used photographs and videos in default of a site visit. The brief was for an exhibition space to accommodate the display of… Read More
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review
04.03.2022
Tom de Paor: ‘i see Earth’, Building and Ground 1991–2021 – Review04.03.2022
On the morning of 12 April 1961, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit, strapped into a spherical capsule fixed to the top of a modified intercontinental ballistic missile. The first to see our planet in its totality, his words were simple: ‘I see Earth. It is so beautiful.’… Read More
The Extended Portal: Atcost
28.02.2022
The Extended Portal: Atcost28.02.2022
On Shatwell farm, two barns stand side by side. The frames of both are precast concrete portal frames, made by Atcost in line with their standard profile and system which existed at the time. [1] A central line of columns is shared between both barns. Due to differing spans, the… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia
23.02.2022
Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia23.02.2022
This is the final episode in the Pan Scroll Zoom series, edited by Fabrizio Gallanti. It was written in April 2021 and first published in print in Drawing Matter Extracts 3: Pan Scroll Zoom. Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape… Read More
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture
21.02.2022
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture21.02.2022
The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘The Cornice’, GTA Papers 6 (2021). It is one of the outcomes of the work done in preparation for the exhibition The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Architecture and Art, which was on show at the Graphische Sammlung of ETH… Read More
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti
07.02.2022
The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti07.02.2022
– Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac
The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam
24.01.2022
Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam24.01.2022
The following text is a version of chapter three from Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image by Michael Young, published by Routledge © 2021. Available from Routledge. Portions of this chapter were initially developed in the essay ‘The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse’ published in Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches… Read More
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi
19.01.2022
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi19.01.2022
Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici
19.01.2022
Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici19.01.2022
– Pier Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Gallanti and Maria S. Giudici
This is the nineteenth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode, he talks to Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici. Pan Scroll Zoom: Teaching… Read More
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams
12.01.2022
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams12.01.2022
In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems. Fully opaque on its east and west… Read More
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould
11.01.2022
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould11.01.2022
The cover of early editions of John Summerson’s book The Classical Language of Architecture features a curious drawing of a Doric entablature. To all intents and purposes the profile of the entablature is correct, but it has been extruded through the method of oblique projection. It is as if we… Read More
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt
11.01.2022
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt11.01.2022
‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci
13.12.2021
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci13.12.2021
Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little houseStill neighbors a streamAnd still harbors its arbors Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little homeCooks on the coal cookerThe wood stove’s still blown[…] Where sertão remainsEvery little house is gladfor on the evenings we get our Hail-MaryAnd the pleasure of being alone ‘Casinha feliz’,… Read More
Hélène Binet: The Outsider
19.05.2022
Hélène Binet: The Outsider19.05.2022
– Hélène Binet
a new way of looking at the world Working in my kitchen in the mornings of the 2020 spring.All is silent. Am I silent or is the whole world?In the darkness, you hear better, said Aristotle.In silence and in a closed environment, can you see better? Suddenly the walls of… Read More
domestic interior