Period: pre-1700
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid
22.03.2022
In the Archive: Laugier, Eisen, Boulogne, Petitot, Percier, Dumont and Hadid22.03.2022
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
17.03.2022
Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (2021) – Review17.03.2022
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
01.03.2022
Painting in Stone (2020) – Review01.03.2022
‘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
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21.02.2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21.02.2022
– Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture
21.02.2022
The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture21.02.2022
The following essay was first published as the introduction to ‘The Cornice’, GTA Papers 6 (2021). It is one of the outcomes of the work done in preparation for the exhibition The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Architecture and Art, which was on show at the Graphische Sammlung of ETH… Read More
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review
18.10.2021
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review18.10.2021
Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More
The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion
15.06.2021
The Language of Architecture: Peter Märkli’s system of proportion15.06.2021
Peter Märkli’s hand-drawn section of the ancient monument Hagia Sophia (532–7) is part of a working process developed alongside his design work. The output is a collection of investigative drawings that document sacred archetypal buildings, and articulate his resolved thesis that ‘architecture has a language’. The drawing illustrates a system… Read More
Medieval Masons and Tracing-floors
10.05.2021
Medieval Masons and Tracing-floors10.05.2021
The tracing-floors of York Minster offer a rare glimpse into the relationship between drawing and the Cathedral, the most iconic monument to medieval Gothic. Tucked away into the loft of a small vestibule connecting the North Transept to the Chapter House, the Mason’s Lodge, as it is known, is one… Read More
The Vitruvian Man: With Fresh Eyes
14.04.2021
The Vitruvian Man: With Fresh Eyes14.04.2021
‘The Vitruvian Man of Leonardo da Vinci as a model of innovative entrepreneurship at the intersection of business, art and technology’ is shown in the first image. This is a ‘modern’ interpretation of the Renaissance drawing as a business model as published in the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in 2017. An… Read More
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints
07.12.2020
Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints07.12.2020
An intriguing Italian Renaissance drawing from the mid-sixteenth century has recently received critical attention through Drawing Matter. [1] Both the recto and the verso of the paper sheet have an ancient temple plan in perspective in a landscape setting, drawn in brown ink and attributed to the Sangallo circle as… Read More
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric
17.11.2020
Sigurd Lewerentz: Siting the Axonometric17.11.2020
One way to think about an axonometric drawing is as a perspective with the vanishing point at infinity. This means that the lines of projection are parallel, which assures dimensional consistency. Early treatises, for example, spoke of parallel projection as analogous to shadows cast by the sun; not, strictly speaking,… Read More
Bramante: Five Dots
16.11.2020
Bramante: Five Dots16.11.2020
The remote past is distant and faded. Original objects and documents that might be used to study it are scarce. They are often uncooperative and most of the time they don’t tell the truth, because they have been reframed by history’s ‘victors’ over the centuries. We must always bear in… Read More
All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture
09.11.2020
All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture09.11.2020
In Louis de Boulogne’s drawing, now in the Drawing Matter collection, Architecture appears as a young woman. She sits leaning on an altar with a Corinthian capital at her feet, compasses in one hand and a portrait of Vignola in the other. Behind her are the ruins of Rome. It… Read More
Palladio’s Lines
15.10.2020
Palladio’s Lines15.10.2020
Andrea Palladio’s Il Quattro Libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570) is a seminal document in the history and theory of architecture. The treatise projects the knowledge of both architectural form and its image. The formation of this knowledge is documented within Palladio’s work textually and visually. The work conveys both the formation… Read More
Trees Make A Plan
07.10.2020
Trees Make A Plan07.10.2020
The following text is the first of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
Architectural Typefaces
29.05.2020
Architectural Typefaces29.05.2020
It is a drawing of a C. A rather normal looking C, a bit condensed perhaps. Its thick and thin parts are distributed along a vertical axis, rather than a diagonal one, so in typographic terms it is a modern C. To me it also looks a bit British, because it only… Read More
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures
18.05.2020
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures18.05.2020
When he sat down to make the drawings that form this eight-page album of Roman buildings, Giovanni Battista Montano began by embossing lines onto the sheet with a stylus, straightedge and compass. Using natural black chalk, he then lightly sketched the principal parts and main particularities of the selected edifices.… Read More
Origins in Translation
20.01.2020
Origins in Translation20.01.2020
Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More
Imaginal Cloud Spaces
31.12.2019
Imaginal Cloud Spaces31.12.2019
Many hours can be spent on what art historian Mary Berry calls ‘the sheer act of looking’ at the Japanese folding-screen paintings titled Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto). [1] Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such paintings captured a seemingly complete image of the capital city. Through the consistent use of… Read More
A Dose of Dosio
24.12.2019
A Dose of Dosio24.12.2019
Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More
Liquid Paper
15.11.2019
Liquid Paper15.11.2019
In The Praise of Hemp-Seed, John Taylor – the self-styled Jacobean ‘water poet’ – at one point asks why poets have never sung the virtues of the plant before. It is, he answers himself, because their words run dry in the face of the limitless goods it brings – ‘the… Read More
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson
07.11.2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson07.11.2019
The first edition of Francesco Milizia’s Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, known in English as The Lives of the Celebrated Architects, Ancient and Modern, was published in Rome by Paolo Giunchi in 1768. Clearly an eighteenth-century incarnation of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and… Read More
Learning from the Tortoise
09.08.2019
Learning from the Tortoise09.08.2019
I. The tortoise is certainly slow, but in the ancient fable it arrives sooner than the hare – or according to the even older paradox of Zeno it always arrives before the mighty runner Achilles. Slowness is usually seen as a negative characteristic, lacking the vibrancy of speed. But everything… Read More
Collection of Sections
02.12.2020
Collection of Sections02.12.2020
– Allen Keith Yee
The following drawings and commentaries have been excerpted from Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections (Oro Editions, 2020). The publication surveys the use of section drawings in the histories of architecture and other professions, from the 17th century to the present. More information on the book can be found here.… Read More
section housing