Tag: art practice

Disinformation: Closed Circuit

Disinformation: Closed Circuit

Joe Banks

If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures. They become richer, even, than architecture, which Le Corbusier rightly says can best be felt at night. – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.  ‘Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space,… Read More

26 Kingly Street Co-Op

26 Kingly Street Co-Op

Editors

Throughout the 1960s, the Artists’ Own Gallery at 26 Kingly Street in Soho held exhibitions, events and gigs. It was run by a group of artists, including Keith Albarn and his wife, Hazel, who exhibited her work there. Malcolm McLaren presented the first public showing of his work at the Gallery… Read More

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Drawing on History: Mirages, Interventions and Contestations

Deanna Petherbridge

This text is the first in a series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she will comment on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social and political issues.  Late last… Read More

Crossing the Abyss

Crossing the Abyss

Deanna Petherbridge

This text, first published in Women Writing Architecture (2021), introduces a new series by artist Deanna Petherbridge in which she will comment on a number of her recent pen and ink drawings. The drawings use imagined architectural imagery as a metaphorical means to deal with complex subject matter about social… Read More

Nobuo Sekine: Phase of Nothingness

Nobuo Sekine: Phase of Nothingness

Editors

With thanks to Nicholas Olsberg for sending us this tribute to Sekine written on the first anniversary of the artist’s death (linked here).

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Peter Märkli: My Facade Material

Editors

The following quotations are from ‘Mein Stoff für Fassaden (My Facade Material)’, a lecture delivered online by Peter Märkli to open a series of five talks for the Architecture Foundation. The quotations are presented here in a loose fashion, some treated as aphorisms about design, others illustrated with drawings from… Read More

The Vitruvian Man: with Fresh Eyes

The Vitruvian Man: with Fresh Eyes

Niamh Murphy

‘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

Place and Displacement: Rubbings from Architecture

Place and Displacement: Rubbings from Architecture

Sam van Strien

The process of making a rubbing transcends the traditional boundaries of architectural draughtsmanship and illustration. A rubbing is made by placing a sheet of paper over an object or textured surface and burnishing its surface with a drawing medium such as graphite or charcoal. Many of us might associate the… Read More

Nancy Holt: Sky Mound

Nancy Holt: Sky Mound

Holt/Smithson Foundation

Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she… Read More

Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’

Haunted: Robert Smithson’s ‘My House is a Decayed House’

Suzaan Boettger

The following text is excerpted from Dr. Suzaan Boettger’s research for her book in process, The Passions of Robert Smithson, Art and Life.  Follow her on Instagram @NatrCultr, where images are tagged #UnknownSmithson. ‘History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors.’ If the sardonic analogy sounds like Robert Smithson, you’re close: it was written by his favorite… Read More

The Problem with Rainbows

The Problem with Rainbows

Adolfo Natalini

Resta sempre insoluto il problema dell’arcobalenoPare que ce ne sia uno dopo la pioggiaE che dall’alto con l’aereoSi veda tutto tornaMa questo metterebbe in crisi tutto quelliChe cercano la pentola d’oro Alle fine dell’arcobaleno C’e sempre un arcobalenoAl di sopra di ogni questione sulla quantitàE qualità dei suoi coloriDopo la pioggiaMa non dopo ogni pioggia… Read More

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

Nicholas Logsdail

A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More

Elliott Glushak vs. The City of New York

Elliott Glushak vs. The City of New York

Philippa Lewis

Is an architectural rendering the work of an artist? Or is it just a skilled service, like a plumber or plasterer? This was the question that was fought out in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in 1958. At stake was the payment of New York sales… Read More

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Two Early Paintings with OMA

Zoe Zenghelis

Here, Zoe Zenghelis, painter and founding member of OMA, recalls the making of two paintings now in the Drawing Matter collection. The first, pictured below, is an aerial view of the unbuilt Hotel Therma, and the second is a version of OMA’s entry to the Parc de la Villette competition.… Read More

Drawing is discovery (1953)

Drawing is discovery (1953)

John Berger

For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Pan Scroll Zoom 4: Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Sofia von Ellrichshausen, Fabrizio Gallanti and Mauricio Pezo

This is the fourth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen of Pezo von… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Steve Larkin

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. Friedrich… Read More

A Glasgow Effect

A Glasgow Effect

Paul Stallan

I draw and make dens to counter the weather of Scotland and the urban dislocation that I experienced from growing up in Glasgow, a city that suffered disproportionately from devastating post-war planning policy and the imposition of industrial modern architecture. The consequences of this are described by the medical term… Read More

Siza at sixteen

Siza at sixteen

Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza

Pouco a pouco, quase sem dar por isso, o carvão começou a não partir, o papel a não manchar, o miolo de pão a manter a plasticidade, o fôlego a aumentar. E a confiança. Slowly but steadily, unwittingly, the lead began to not break, paper to not stain, the bread… Read More

L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)

L’Invasion de la Viande (1980)

Elie Delamare-Debouteville

As part of an imagined intervention in the subterranean spaces of the redeveloped Les Halles, Jean Criton’s project describes the new Metro station invaded, in a sinister process of parthenogenesis, by the meat from the Pavillon de la Boucherie, which had stood on the site until its controversial demolition eight… Read More

The Iconography of Desolation

The Iconography of Desolation

Robert Smithson

‘We now discover an iconoscope that shall forgive the divorce of heaven and hell while it flashes before us for our selective graces – the bits and pieces of Divine Catastrophe. Such a scope has lost all division and order. One must pick over the scattered icons the way a… Read More

Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach

Leonhard Lapin: Objects on the Beach

Andres Kurg

Two square black-and-white ink and gouache drawings from 1973 by Estonian architect and artist Leonhard Lapin show scenes from a deserted Baltic beach. On a calm white seashore, below the somewhat sinister black sky and the straight line of the horizon, stand solitary objects: two large flat L-shaped figures on… Read More

Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption

Domestication and the Permutation of Interruption

Dara Birnbaum

My first experience with video art happened by chance. After obtaining an architecture degree from Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I joined Lawrence Halprin & Associates, an architectural firm in San Francisco that specialised in the planning of urban spaces and then conveying, through varying means of visual communication, such ideas… Read More

Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types

Lauretta Vinciarelli’s West Texas Types

Caitlin Murray

Lauretta Vinciarelli was born in 1943 in Arbe, Italy and raised in Rome. In the mid-1960s she attended graduate school at the La Sapienza University in Rome, earning her doctorate in architecture and urban planning in 1971. As a student she encountered the typological and vernacular approaches to housing and… Read More