Period: pre-1700
Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy
05.06.2025
Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy05.06.2025
Livia Lupi’s book Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy: Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice addresses a topic of recurring interest to readers of DM and DMJournal: the relation of actual to pictorial representations of architecture and its ornament in early fifteenth-century Italy. Harvey Miller has adorned… Read More
DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait
26.05.2025
DMJ – Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de Architectura as Self-Portrait26.05.2025
Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de architectura (London, The British Museum, ms. 197.b.21) is one of the most enigmatic records of the architect’s celebrated career as a designer of machines. Born in the Sienese workshop and completed with an eloquent Latin dedication at the court of Urbino, the manuscript’s 195 unique drawings are both… Read More
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation
06.03.2025
DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation06.03.2025
The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’.… Read More
Montano – Don’t Speak About Me
10.01.2025
Montano – Don’t Speak About Me10.01.2025
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
15.11.2024
On Origins and Originality15.11.2024
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
14.11.2024
DMJ – Five Episodes from the History of Drawing Instruments14.11.2024
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
24.10.2024
DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing24.10.2024
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
22.08.2024
A Missing Drawing22.08.2024
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
16.08.2024
Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno16.08.2024
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
12.08.2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12.08.2024
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
20.03.2024
DMJ – The Sun as Drawing Machine: Towards the Unification of Projection Systems from Villalpando to Farish20.03.2024
– 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
15.02.2024
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens15.02.2024
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
14.02.2024
DMJ – Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture14.02.2024
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
17.01.2024
Visualizing the Renaissance Worksite and the problems of graphic translation 17.01.2024
– 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
08.12.2023
The Polyhedrists (2022) – Review08.12.2023
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
08.11.2023
Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building08.11.2023
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
30.10.2023
Raffaello. Nato architetto (2023) – Review30.10.2023
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
14.06.2023
Drawing as Preservation14.06.2023
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
02.05.2023
Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop02.05.2023
– 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
Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden
20.01.2023
Grotto-Heavens: Rockeries, Dreamscapes and the Chinese Garden20.01.2023
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
DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge
15.11.2022
DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge15.11.2022
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
22.08.2022
On Bramante (2022) – Review22.08.2022
– 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
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople
28.11.2022
W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople28.11.2022
– 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
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