Period: pre-1700
Trees Make A Plan
7 October 2020
Trees Make A Plan7 October 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 May 2020
Architectural Typefaces29 May 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 May 2020
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures18 May 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
Imaginal Cloud Spaces
31 December 2019
Imaginal Cloud Spaces31 December 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 December 2019
A Dose of Dosio24 December 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 November 2019
Liquid Paper15 November 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
7 November 2019
Francesco Milizia on Maderno, Posi and Jonson7 November 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
9 August 2019
Learning from the tortoise9 August 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
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse
20 July 2018
arq : plan, Stan Allen, Helen Mallinson, Niall Hobhouse20 July 2018
arq & Drawing Matter To launch the collaboration with Drawing Matter, and in continued celebration of arq’s recent twenty-first anniversary, the first issue of Volume 22 opens with a collection of twenty-one pairs of plan drawings. Stan Allen, Niall Hobhouse, and Helen Mallinson chose the images in an intense one-day session.… Read More
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon
1 March 2018
Louis Le Vau: Château de Meudon1 March 2018
– Basile Baudez, Alexandre Cojannot and Alexandre Gady
Built in the 16th century on the banks of the river Seine, west of Paris, the castle of Meudon stands amidst the great French Renaissance monuments that were ultimately destroyed. When it was bought by Abel Servien in 1654, the old castle – built under François I in brick and stone… Read More
Gilles-Marie Oppenord
15 December 2017
Gilles-Marie Oppenord15 December 2017
For French architects, the Grand Prix (later the Prix de Rome) was not formalized until 1720; however, study in the Italian peninsula was considered a crucial stage of an aspiring architect’s education. Gilles-Marie Oppenord, son of a cabinet-maker to Louis XIV, travelled to Rome in 1692 under the patronage of Edouard Colbert, marquis… Read More
Origins in Translation
20 January 2020
Origins in Translation20 January 2020
– Mari Lending
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
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