Period: c21st

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

Clancy Moore Architects: Atcost

Clancy Moore Architects: Atcost

Andrew Clancy and Colm Moore

The Atcost project makes space for storage, education and performance, enabling a diverse range of activities to enhance the growing programme of Drawing Matter: summer schools, events, and away days for universities and practices. After noticing that the vast majority of these activities take place in summer, we proposed an… Read More

Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt

Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt

Richard Hall

Notations is a collection of pamphlets in a box. Curating the content in this manner has allowed the editors to present the publication as a physical representation of their thesis that the notebook is a device for the cultivation of individual worlds. The plurality is important. The pamphlets are collected… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock

Pan Scroll Zoom 17: Monadnock

Job Floris and Fabrizio Gallanti

This is the seventeenth 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, Fabrizio interviews Job Floris, co-founder of Mondanock, about their teaching studios at the EFPL and Harvard… Read More

The Silo at 40Hz

The Silo at 40Hz

Joe Banks and Jonah Ginsburg

DISINFORMATION, CLOSED CIRCUIT, 2021Video documentation recorded on August 1, 2021 – the last day of the installation. Headphones recommended. ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and [of] engendering dreams’, and, perhaps paradoxically, in the silo at Shatwell, a familiar architectural form is re-purposed… Read More

Unpeopled Places

Unpeopled Places

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the third 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

Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia

Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia

Biba Dow

This painting was made in the early evening in the main square of the medieval town of Gubbio, in central Italy (Perugia). Reached by climbing up narrow winding streets, the Piazza Grande opens out as a belvedere to the southwest, looking across rooftops to the plain below the Apennine foothills.… Read More

Craving Primal Architecture

Craving Primal Architecture

Rory Chisholm

‘Architecture does not only respond to the functional and conscious intellectual and social needs of today’s city dweller; it must also remember the primordial hunter and farmer concealed in the body. Our sensations of comfort, protection and home are rooted in the primordial experiences of countless generations.’ [1] – Juhani Pallasmaa… Read More

Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa

Where to Begin? – Juhani Pallasmaa

Juhani Pallasmaa

This is the first in a series revisiting responses from architects to the question: Where to Begin?. The question was posed by the Drawing Matter editors while compiling the first volume in our Extracts series – find more information here. Beginning to sketch a project has always been easier for me… Read More

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