Period: c21st

Besides, History (2018): Book Review

Besides, History (2018): Book Review

Stan Allen

It has a lot to do with misinterpretation. There is no real truth in history. Everything you see belongs to the past and you interpret it in your own way. Its related to visiting buildings, but also to an abstraction in how you re-represent architecture, appropriating it in your own… Read More

Building the Gowan Shed

Building the Gowan Shed

Jonah Ginsburg

Through the week of July 12–17, thirteen young architects camped at Shatwell Farm in order to realise a shed from an enigmatic early drawing by James Gowan. The workshop was initiated and led by Maria-Chiara Piccinelli of PiM.studio and Corinna Dean of ARCA. This film portrays the (re)design and construction… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas

Luis Callejas

This is the sixteenth 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. Here, Luis Callejas (LCLA OFFICE) discusses his teaching studios at the Yale School of Architecture and the… Read More

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Postcards: The Nature of Images

Luca Galofaro

Our vision is simultaneously determined by the (past) historical structure of the work and by the present structure of the gaze that examines it, in which the accumulated glimpses of history often continue to operate.– Daniel Arasse Writing a postcard is the simplest thing in the world. Among other things,… Read More

Forced Migrations, Barriers and Vanishing Asylums

Forced Migrations, Barriers and Vanishing Asylums

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the second 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,… Read More

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

On Pristine Boxes and Primeval Huts

Frank Bauer

Along with his Do Hit Chair (2000), a pristine stainless steel box measuring 1000 x 700 x 750 mm, Dutch-born designer Marijn van der Poll supplies a sledgehammer. In an act of brute physical force he requires the user to expressively sculpt his own seating morphology, not only allowing but… Read More

36 Elevations

36 Elevations

Calum Storrie

I began this series of drawings with something else in mind. The first picture was to be drawn freehand, but I took a wrong turn straight away by setting up a structure using a set-square around which the composition would be based. I realised that the structure was already a… Read More

Shatwell Farm: A Step Up

Shatwell Farm: A Step Up

John Glew

Imagined as something in between a small building or piece of furniture and a block for mounting a horse, these steps are a shortcut to an out-of-sight sauna that sits above a slope amongst the trees. They are directly visible when leaving the dairy house, sitting to one side of… Read More

Letter to the Editors: What I See in Drawings Today…

Letter to the Editors: What I See in Drawings Today…

Andrea Leonardi

All the discussions, observations or decisions, concerning any of the projects of Aldo Rossi, by clients, city mayors, commissions or whoever had to approve or express a comment, were always made over his first sketch. There you had everything, the building – or whatever was the project for – was… Read More

Disinformation: Closed Circuit

Disinformation: Closed Circuit

Joe Banks

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures. They become richer, even, than architecture, which Le Corbusier rightly says can best be felt at night. – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.  ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space,… Read More

Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential

Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential

Louis Mayes

Below is a sketch of a traditional South Korean Pojagi (a handcrafted patchwork tapestry) drawn by Florian Beigel. Described as ‘beautifully unsure’, it shows the importance of the sketch in translating between a reference and the key concept of the Pojagi House, designed by Beigel and the Architectural Research Unit… Read More

Keeping a Notebook

Keeping a Notebook

Simon Unwin

Looking into other people’s notebooks is to witness moments of creative exploration and growth. A graphic facility in others can provoke envy, but being given access into someone else’s mind and seeing where it wanders is always stimulating. As the examples published by Drawing Matter illustrate, architects’ notebooks harbour many… Read More

Stephen Taylor: Haybarn

Stephen Taylor: Haybarn

Brendan Woods

‘What looks like a fairly simple building from a distance becomes more and more sophisticated the closer one looks. The gentle slope to the trabeated front elevation subtly reveals itself, for example, cleverly disguised by the character of the jagged brick columns built out of snapped headers and filled with… Read More

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the first in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she will comment 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.  Late last… Read More

The Over Under: Drawing as process

The Over Under: Drawing as process

Peter William Rae

The Over Under series is a look at drawing as process, but in this instance, not the process of designing a building or object, but rather an amplification and deepening of the reality we encounter. Reality here begins with a place but has since transformed into working and imagining through… Read More

An Everyday Detail

An Everyday Detail

Priit Jürimäe

Representation of architectural design often focuses on a limited number of sources – artistic conceptual sketches and diagrams, dreamy computer-generated renders, or carefully curated photographs of the finished building. These three media capture the continuity of the concept and can stand on their own right.  The mundane reality of architectural… Read More

I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day

I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day

Marie-Henriette Desmoures

With a circumference of approximately 10cm, I compress the majestic mountain. I pressure it between my fingers and the board and I slice. The contours fall on the board; in a matter of minutes, they will turn once more into a fragrant and luminous mountain. The emotional downpour induced by… Read More

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

BOLLES+WILSON: Sketching-Over Albania

Peter Wilson

Having devoted a number of years to techniques and images engendered by holding a wood encased rod of graphite, I some years ago experienced a sort of premature redundancy, noticing that those about me husbanding architecture were now mysteriously clutching not a pencil but a mouse. I had already technologically… Read More

biq: Revealing Construction

biq: Revealing Construction

Neil Middleton

The French Modernist Auguste Perret is famously quoted as saying that ‘Construction is the mother tongue of the architect. The architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in terms of construction’.  If this is the case, and given drawings are the primary communication tool for architects, it is perhaps… Read More

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal

Olivier Bellflamme

It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More

Notes on the 2020 Summer School: Encounters in landscape

Notes on the 2020 Summer School: Encounters in landscape

Marwa El Mubark

The notion of the countryside as a space for radical transformation, a messy intersection of heterogeneity far removed from the homogenising forces of the city centre, makes it the perfect territory for experimentation. As a landscape where change is the only context, Shatwell Farm is the ideal setting for an… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Pan Scroll Zoom 12: Elizabeth Hatz

Elizabeth Hatz

This is the twelfth 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, Elizabeth Hatz discusses her personal experience of the pandemic and its consequences for… Read More

To Assist

To Assist

Ruben Casqero

Computer Assisted Drawings (CAD) have existed since the mid-60s. A young Ivan Sutherland received a doctorate at MIT introducing Sketchpad, a device that by the means of an optical pen allowed the direct edition of graphical objects. Around the 35th century BC, someone was writing the first hieroglyph text over… Read More

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Bovenbouw Architectuur: One Paper Model and Three Paper Collages

Ciaran Scannell

The layers found in Bovenbouw Architectuur’s collages are analogous to the layering in their architecture – there to be unravelled by those willing to search. Sometimes ruinous, never complete, they are a representation of uncanny worlds where chimneystacks become doors, tyres become classical pediments and windows are adorned with eyelashes.… Read More