Period: pre-1700

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

Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (2021) – Review

Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (2021) – Review

Anthony Vidler

From the frescoes of Pompeii to the Great Hall of Siedlecin, from the Book of Kells to the Book of Hours, architecture has been depicted in full colour. Where colour has been largely absent in the history of architectural representation, however, is in the more technical drawings of architects themselves.… Read More

Painting in Stone (2020) – Review

Painting in Stone (2020) – Review

Jonathan Foote

‘Matter endures, form is lost.’ —Pierre de Ronsard [1] Fabio Barry’s recent book, Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, opens with an unlikely frontispiece. Rather than a photograph of a historical case, as suggested by the title, Barry presents a contemporary artwork… Read More