Period: c21st

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

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

Montage-Entourage; Or The Politics Of The Seam

Michael Young

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

Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi

António Choupina

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

Pan Scoll Zoom 19: Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici

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

Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams

Daniel Luis Martinez

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

Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould

Charles Holland

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

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

Helen Thomas

‘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

The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci

Abilio Guerra

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

In Defence of Metaphor

In Defence of Metaphor

Deanna Petherbridge

This text concludes Deanna Petherbridge’s series Drawing as Metaphor. The complete series will appear as a printed publication in the new year, designed by Studio Christopher Victor; the drawings will be on show at the Art Space Gallery (84 St Peter’s Street, London N1 8JS) in an exhibition titled Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing… Read More

Movements of the Drawing Hand

Movements of the Drawing Hand

Paul Clarke

How can you study the movements of the drawing hand? Although completed drawings can be interpreted, much the same way graphologists analyse the sequencing and flow of handwriting, can we see an architecture in the movements of the drawing hand? Can we be inside a drawing, and witness, as paper… Read More

El Croquis 208: DOGMA familiar/unfamiliar 2002–2021 (2021): Review

El Croquis 208: DOGMA familiar/unfamiliar 2002–2021 (2021): Review

Leonard Ma

As one of the most prominent architecture publications in the world, El Croquis has long been a prestige showcase for the upper echelon of architectural practices. Its publication format, with each issue typically devoted to a specific practice, lends El Croquis more the air of an exclusive monograph series than… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects

Pan Scroll Zoom 18: Wolff Architects

Fabrizio Gallanti, Ilze Wolff and Heinrich Wolff

This is the eighteenth 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, Heinrich Wolff and Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects discuss the production of their drawings,… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More

Architectonic Landscapes

Architectonic Landscapes

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the fifth in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she comments on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues. Read the introduction to the series, here.… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance

Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance

Ahmed Belkhodja

Negatives Of the 120,027 items included in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 16,010 are part of the collection called ‘Architecture’, and 22,877 are filed as ‘Negative film’. Astonishingly, only one entry sits in both: ‘Ensemble de 12 négatifs couleur (4 pour le projet Bizan, 6 pour le… Read More

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis

The site chosen by Juan S., an Argentinian with a penchant for Italy, was almost alarmingly steep and sheer above the sea. Even the path leading to it was perilous, and trodden with bated breath. During our long conversations about where the house would be built, we were not so… Read More

Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review

Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review

Helen Thomas

What is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.– Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957 This seemingly simple book is a thought-provoking collection of things. There is a lot of room for implication… Read More

The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review

The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review

Cammy Brothers

Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More

Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition

Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition

Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo

This conversation between Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo was first published, in German translation, in issue 238 of ARCH+ (March 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the editors of ARCH+ for allowing us to publish the original English version of the text. Momoyo Kaijima: With… Read More

Doodles: Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1984–2000

Doodles: Stirling Wilford and Associates, 1984–2000

Marco Iuliano

The architectural trajectory of James Stirling has always been considered that of the individual genius, whilst acknowledging his close links to certain educational and working companions: his lifetime maestro Colin Rowe; the partners James Gowan and Michael Wilford, and the Associates, Laurence Bain and Russell Bevington. Without diminishing the importance and the inspirational role of… Read More

The Order of Terror

The Order of Terror

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the fourth in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she comments on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues. Read the introduction to the series, here.… Read More

Christoph Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika (2020): Review

Christoph Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika (2020): Review

Erandi de Silva

The Opera Village is a complex located thirty kilometres from the capital of Burkina Faso that was initiated by the late German film, theatre, and opera director, author, and action artist, Christoph Schlingensief and envisioned as a site centring African artists and enabling cross-cultural creative exchange. The ever-expanding project combines… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material

Writing Prize 2021: Reading Material

Rebecca Disney

This is a narrative of listening: listening to materials, processes, place and self. When you sit in a room and read a book you are not looking at your environment – you perceive, touch, and smell its atmosphere and presence. Inadvertently, you register the space that surrounds you. During the initial… Read More

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Writing Prize 2021: Live My Drawings

Ying Xuan Chian

Prologue: Panic! at K’s office Location: K’s office, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower Characters: Tutor: K (calm, knowing) Student: Me (facing an existential crisis, encountering a creative block, second-year hysteria… you get the idea) Brief: To design a library  I am fascinated by the heterogeneity of our experience of built… Read More