Period: c21st

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Diagrams: Hans van der Heijden in Conversation with Richard Hall

Richard Hall

Hans van der Heijden is an Amsterdam-based architect. He co-founded biq in 1994 with Rick Wessels before establishing his own office, Hans van der Heijden Architect, in 2014. During this timeframe he has developed a recognisable and idiosyncratic drawing repertoire, the origins of which can be traced back to his… Read More

Notes on Architectural Education and Drawing

Notes on Architectural Education and Drawing

Rafael Sousa Santos

The speed of transformation that characterises our contemporality is largely motivated by the development of the newest information technologies. The speed introduced by computation seems to be the promoter of the instability that reaches the conceptions of almost all professional and disciplinary fields since it imposes a pace of change… Read More

Crossing the Abyss

Crossing the Abyss

Deanna Petherbridge

This text, first published in Women Writing Architecture (2021), introduces a new 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… Read More

Open Wide / Wide Open

Open Wide / Wide Open

Angharad Davies

We started with six words: a short-term dwelling for an artist then added:   with a child What adaptations have you made to your domestic space since having a child? / What adaptations have you made to your work space since having a child? / How / When / Where do… Read More

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Editors

The following quotations are from ‘Mein Stoff für Fassaden (My Facade Material)’, a lecture delivered online by Peter Märkli to open a series of five talks for the Architecture Foundation. The quotations are presented here in a loose fashion, some treated as aphorisms about design, others illustrated with drawings from… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 11: Architecten Jan De Vylder Inge Vinck

Pan Scroll Zoom 11: Architecten Jan De Vylder Inge Vinck

Fabrizio Gallanti, Inge Vinck and Jan De Vylder

This is the eleventh 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 Fabrizio interviews Jan De Vylder and Inge Vinck about their teaching… Read More

Physical & Digital Drawing

Physical & Digital Drawing

Reuben Roberts

When we use a Computer Aided Design (CAD) programme we invoke the act of drawing as we draw the mouse around on the desk. The cursor is drawn across the screen, albeit with a level of discontinuity as the lines of code convert the signals of the optical sensor into… Read More

Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt

Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt

Adam Caruso

Review On the occasion of the publication of this book, and the associated exhibition, which was a part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale of 2019, Sébastien Marot gave a talk that positioned his work about the Country’s Side in relation to Rem Koolhaas’s almost contemporaneous Guggenheim exhibition, Countryside. Marot was… Read More

The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple

The Architecture of Nothingness: Analysing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple

Frank Lyons

The Architecture of Nothingness: Drawing the Drawings As architects we have learned to read drawings almost instantly. At a glance we see what the spaces feel like, what it will be like to move around the building and perhaps even get a sense of the appropriateness of the structure. This ‘presentational’ way… Read More

Place and Displacement: Rubbings from Architecture

Place and Displacement: Rubbings from Architecture

Sam van Strien

The process of making a rubbing transcends the traditional boundaries of architectural draughtsmanship and illustration. A rubbing is made by placing a sheet of paper over an object or textured surface and burnishing its surface with a drawing medium such as graphite or charcoal. Many of us might associate the… Read More

Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield

Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield

Larry Richards

Dear Nicholas, It was wonderful to connect to your seminar and with you. We must catch up soon. I learned a lot from your presentation. And it brought back a flood of memories. Just now I quickly sketched the open plan house my father designed and had built in 1946,… Read More

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): Review & Excerpts

Helen Thomas

Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard

Pan Scroll Zoom 10: Studio Othenin-Girard

Guillaume Othenin-Girard

This is the tenth 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, Guillaume Othenin-Girard discusses his studio at the University of Hong Kong which explored… Read More

Studio Mumbai’s Tape Drawing

Studio Mumbai’s Tape Drawing

Irfan Safdag

Rain falls from the sky as a five-month monsoon season sweeps across India. Often associated with abundance and blessing, rain is a sign of good prospects, particularly for Southwest Indian farmers who are dependent on rainfall for their crops. The Saatrasta-Mahindra tape drawing embodies the term ‘adapting to place’, as… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms

Pan Scroll Zoom 9: The Screen ClassRooms

Anuj Daga

This is the ninth 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 Anuj Daga, Assistant Professor at the School of Environment & Architecture, Mumbai, explores… Read More

The Floor Plan of a Room

The Floor Plan of a Room

Thomas Hutton

Drawn from memory, the floor plan of a room in which two plan chests stand apart like two rectangular islands, plain-faced in plan but each one a tower of uncountable lines, paper upon paper suspended and preserved within the pellucid sleeves of polyester where they lie dormant and entombed as… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch

Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch

Patrick Lynch

This is the eighth 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 we share Instagram posts by Patrick Lynch in which he describes his experience… Read More

Excerpt: Shadow Places

Excerpt: Shadow Places

Simon Unwin

The following text is excerpted from Simon Unwin’s book on shadow, in his series Analysing Architecture Notebooks, available here. For 20% off until May 31st 2021, use code KHL20. The piece is illustrated with drawings specially selected by Simon from the Drawing Matter collection. ‘Yea, though I walk through the… Read More

Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things

Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things

Paul Clarke

The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More

Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation

Make me Hyper-Real: Image Ethics and the Architectural Visualisation

Daniel Innes

Architectural visualisations sell us the image of a new reality. In depicting a building that is designed, rather than completed, they constitute a kind of spatial hypothesis: a temptation of a happier, wealthier, and more connected world. By constructing these fictions through the means of the image, they sell us the notion that the project it depicts will improve our lives for the better. … Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample

This is the seventh 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 Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More

Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt

Stan Allen’s Situated Objects (2020): Review & Excerpt

Niall Hobhouse

Review Three times a week a package arrives in Somerset with another Practice Monograph, and the generous proposal that we might want to add it to the library at Drawing Matter. This is clearly an old story – somewhere we have a copy of one of John Soane’s endless books… Read More

Re-presenting the Rococo

Re-presenting the Rococo

David Valinsky

In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More

Take One: Architects on Drawing

Take One: Architects on Drawing

Editors

Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More