Period: pre-1700

Montano – Don’t speak about me

Montano – Don’t speak about me

Cammy Brothers

Dear Niall, Before I forget, I wanted to send you the transcription from the Montano sheet. You can post it as my little discovery. Non dir di me se su di me non sai senza di te che poi di me dirai?Non fare ad aloro quello che a te non piace … Read More

On origins and originality

On origins and originality

Niall Hobhouse

The following text by Niall Hobhouse is included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture. The exhibition, previously shown at the Kunstmuseum in Olten, opened at EPFL on the 5th of November and will close on the 2nd of December 2024. It includes nearly 100 drawings from… Read More

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments

Neil Bingham

Instruments of Building in Ancient Rome Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, portrays being an architect (architectus) in ancient Rome as a daunting task. The knowledge of the architect, he notes, must encompass the understanding of geometry, engineering, optics, history, philosophy, astronomy, and even music and medicine. At a… Read More

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

Sayan Skandarajah

There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More

A Missing Drawing

A Missing Drawing

John Evelyn

Being casualy in the Privy Gallery at White-hall, his Majestie [Charles II] gave me thanks (before divers Lords & noble men) for my Book of Architecture & Sylva againe: That they were the best designed & usefull for the matter & subject, the best printed & designd (meaning the Tallè doucès [engravings] of the Paralelles) that… Read More

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Cara Rachele

The following text was first presented at the 2021 edition of the Lucerne Talks, the biennial Symposium on Pedagogy in Architecture at HSLU’s School of Engineering and Architecture in Lucerne; Drawing Matter’s Niall Hobhouse and Matt Page also took part, with their text Quantum Collecting. It was later published as… Read More

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Fernanda Canales

My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More

DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish

DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish

Francisco Javier Girón Sierra

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Spanish Jesuit Juan Bautista Villalpando spent his last years of life in Rome obsessively working on an interpretation of the Temple of Solomon. When he came to the question of how to represent its plan, he envisioned a new, almost ghostly, way… Read More

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), designing gardens

Tim Richardson

In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More

DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture

DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture

Fabio Colonnese

The grid and the squared paper have played an important role in architectural practice, both in analysing and measuring what already exists (sites, monuments, etc.) and in organising and modularising the graphic development of the design process. The use of the square grid is generally linked to Greek civilization, mathematics,… Read More

Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation  

Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation  

Jarne Geenens and Elizabeth Merrill

Francesco di Giorgio’s autograph manuscript of machine design, the Opusculum de architectura is among the most enigmatic records of early modern architecture.[1] Dedicated to Duke Federico da Montefeltro, the compact vellum manuscript celebrates the art and ingenuity of technical design, while simultaneously capturing the energy and ambition of the fabled… Read More

The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review

The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

The Polyhedrists is described as ‘a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern period’.[1] Despite it being a relatively short book, it offers a complex and confronting view of polyhedra’s history; polyhedra being three-dimensional convex shapes with flat polygonal faces and straight edges. Its author, Noam… Read More

Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building

Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building

Konogan Beaufay

This polychrome mosaic, discovered in 1872 in Rome near Termini train station, is the only mosaic depiction of a plan of a bath building known from the Roman period. Only three fragments were recovered, representing less than five percent of the original mosaic whose dimensions approximated 3.40 x 5.70 m. Two… Read More

Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review

Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review

Dario Donetti

Architectural history is a delicate matter when it comes to exhibitions: especially, if the subject is a creator like Raphael (1487-1520) whose work as a designer, despite its relevance, survives in a dramatically fragmentary state. Thus, it can only be reconstructed by means of analytical philology, mostly using secondary sources,… Read More

Drawing as Preservation

Drawing as Preservation

Lisa Huang

Jiang Yuan’s ‘Epanggong Illustration’ is a reverie made real by the tip of Yuan’s paintbrush. It is simultaneously a fantasy of a past to which one cannot return, a fascination with a form of existence that has disappeared, and also a set of ideas, which live on in spheres far… Read More

Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings exploring the relationship between form, space and programme. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings in which the site is the designer’s focus. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More

Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden

Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden

Ethan Loo

Stone, hard and unfeeling, appears in our contemporary lexicon as a metaphor for the lifeless and the immutable. Yet in the classical gardens and paintings of China, stones were objects of fascination for the élite literati for precisely the opposite reason: the cosmic forces of creation and dissolution they, and… Read More

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

Hugh Strange

This is the third text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. William Lethaby’s second book, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, published in 1894, could hardly have started on its subject more emphatically, ‘Sancta Sophia is the most… Read More

DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge

DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge

Jonathan Foote

This text, published alongside Bernhard Siegert’s article ‘From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps’ marks the launch of the first and second issues of DMJournal–Architecture and Representation. Over the coming months, we will be publishing articles from both DMJ 1: The Geological Imagination and DMJ 2: Drawing Instruments/Instrumental Drawings. The… Read More

On Bramante (2022) – Review

On Bramante (2022) – Review

Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan

Thomas Padmanabhan: We are very happy to have this book, On Bramante, in front of us. It was written by a friend of ours, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, who is a writer, a teacher and also a practising architect and founding partner of baukuh in Milan. For a while, even before encountering… Read More

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Mark Dorrian and Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Drawing Matter is delighted to present three texts by Alberto Pérez-Gómez on architecture and its representation, the first writings by him to be carried on the Drawing Matter website. The first, ‘Architecture as Drawing’, is an early essay that initially appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1982, a… Read More

The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves

The Anatomy of the Architectural Book: Magical Moves

André Tavares

In 1586 Domenico Fontana completed the extraordinary task, commissioned by Pope Sixtus V, of moving the Vatican obelisk. The structure was said to have a ‘mysterious magic of an unknown civilization’, accepted by Christians due to the belief that it had witnessed the martyrdom of Saint Peter. In this text, André… Read More

In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid

In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid

Christiane Matt

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. In this series, Drawing Matter invites visitors to write about material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that they have viewed as part of their research. On a crisp January morning I made my way to York railway station to visit… Read More