Tag: DMC

Protected: The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

Protected: The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

Nicholas Olsberg

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important

Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important

Editors

On Friday 7 November, Drawing Matter welcomed architects Tony Fretton and Benjamin Machin to the archive for a conversation to open the exhibition ‘Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important’. Anchored by seven ‘artefacts’ now in the Drawing Matter Collection, the conversation explores the roles of drawings, photography, and sketchbooks… Read More

Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks 

Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks 

Elizabeth Hatz

The sketchbook is your loyal private companion, your eyewitness and accomplice on voyeuristic escapes and inquisitive journeys. It is a brain in your hand, mirroring even subconscious registrations, only discovered afterwards, as you flick through the pages, absent-mindedly. You remember—much has already entered you, through the hand. I cry when… Read More

The Viennese School at Drawing Matter

The Viennese School at Drawing Matter

Iain Boyd Whyte

Drawing Matter’s collection of Viennese drawings from the 19th and early 20th century includes works by Franz Jakob Kreuter, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Schönthal, Emil Hoppe, and Friedrich Ohmann, among others. It was a time of great technological advance, social upheaval, cultural revolt, and changing attitudes to design.  Considered as a group, the… Read More

Tomas Schmit: Two New Ways to Draw a Circle

Tomas Schmit: Two New Ways to Draw a Circle

Editors, Berit Schuck and Barbara Wien

In 1971, the artist Tomas Schmit was commissioned to design the cover for Instant Composers Pool 010, an experimental jazz album featuring performances by Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg recorded live at the Stedelijk Museum. It was Schmit’s first album cover—he subsequently designed two others for the Berlin jazz label… Read More

Protected: On the Open Hand atop Bhakra Nangal Dam

Protected: On the Open Hand atop Bhakra Nangal Dam

Vikramaditya Prakash

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

Protected: The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays

Sin Centre: Sheen and Transparent Overlays

Nat Chard and Michael Webb

Following a lively debate at Drawing Matter about the surface and support of Michael Webb’s isometric drawing of a car ramp, Nat Chard thought to ask Michael himself how he made it. Dear all, On Monday we had a conversation about one of Mike Webb’s Sin Centre drawings that had a print-like… Read More

Protected: Photographing Drawings

Protected: Photographing Drawings

Jesper Authen

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

In Palau, Sardinia, on the East Coast

In Palau, Sardinia, on the East Coast

Gio Ponti

Anyone who has seen and contemplated certain beautiful and simple ancient Mediterranean houses, such as those found in Greece, Spain, Portugal and southern Italy, knows that modern examples rarely possess the wisdom and beauty of these anonymous, traditional dwellings.  Wisdom, above all: the thickness of the walls, for coolness and… Read More

Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter

Andrea Branzi & Archizoom Associati at Drawing Matter

Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Francesco Fiammenghi

To probe the long and multifaceted career of Andrea Branzi (1938–2023), one must first turn to his formative years at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence in the early 1960s. At the time, the Florence School became the incubator of several of Italy’s postwar avant-garde groups, including… Read More

Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors

Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors

Lucien Hervé

We are thankful to Ross Anderson, who identified these statements Lucien Hervé made when interviewed by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, and which are pertinent to this contact sheet in the Drawing Matter Collection: ‘When Le Corbusier received me in his office one day, we talked for a long time; I remember that he… Read More

Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter

Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Ulrich Rückriem’s Anröchter Dolomit Projekt

Ulrich Rückriem’s Anröchter Dolomit Projekt

Matt Page

A drawing for?A drawing of?Before?After?An explanation?An idea?An instruction?Precise?Approximate?Careful?Loose?For the artist?For us?For sale? A seemingly quiet drawing raises many questions. Ulrich Rückriem splits, saws and breaks stone. It is a process that defies determination through drawing—or perhaps one that is itself drawing. How can an idea be drawn for a material… Read More

William Butterfield at Drawing Matter

William Butterfield at Drawing Matter

Nicholas Olsberg

William Butterfield was a British architect who trained first as a builder’s apprentice and then as an architect in offices at London and Worcester before opening his own London studio in 1838, continuing in full practice until 1886, and then on a limited scale through to 1897. He was the… Read More

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

John Pudney

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Bernat Klein Studio

Bernat Klein Studio

Neil Gillespie

Travelling north through the Borders over the years, regardless of route, a diversion along a twisting country road north of Selkirk was always on the cards. Navigating a dangerous bend in the road, no time to stop, was rewarded by a fleeting glimpse of an enigmatic presence amongst the trees.… Read More

In the Archive: Maristella Casciato

In the Archive: Maristella Casciato

Maristella Casciato

From April to July, Maristella Casciato was Drawing Matter’s Visiting Scholar—our first in London. During her time in the archive, she made new discoveries and started many stimulating conversations. Among other things, she closely studied Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Punjab Grille Capitol album, translated a selection of Gio Ponti’s illustrated letters,… Read More

Carlos Diniz: London 2025

Carlos Diniz: London 2025

Editors

‘As a piece of urban design [it] is simply abysmal. A wonderful opportunity to create a new place in London with innovative urban forms has been missed… The layout is simplistic and banal, the architecture lumpy and mediocre—the whole looks like a chunk of some ageing, tired and dreary US… Read More

Orgonic Architecture

Orgonic Architecture

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

A face is drawn over a torso; breasts are transformed into eyes with nipples as pupils, the nose curves along the edge of the ribcage, and the belly button is the pursed smoking and kissing mouth, above hangs a necklace made of spherical beads, acting like a curled fringe. The… Read More

DMJ – Riddle as Method, Transparency at Play: Aldo Van Eyck at Baambrugge

DMJ – Riddle as Method, Transparency at Play: Aldo Van Eyck at Baambrugge

Laura Harty

As work on site at the Orphanage (1956-1960) neared completion, Aldo van Eyck was busy exploring and expanding the reach of his ideas through a number of interlaced and mutually generative projects, editorial of Forum magazine (1959-63), contributions to the reorganisation and ultimate dissolution of CIAM (1954-1960) and the design of a… Read More

Banana Ballpoint

Banana Ballpoint

James Gowan

design for a ball-point pen to be the same size as a banana, in plastic with soft rubber skin, and in bold natural colour, technicolour preferably. based on the observation that a ‘peeled’ banana is good functional shape for writing—not unlike a quill pen nor much like one either. 1st… Read More

Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks

Polly Hutchison on John Ruskin’s Rocks

Polly Hutchison

In early July, Polly Hutchison from the Natural History Museum spent an afternoon at Drawing Matter examining a number of specimens from John Ruskin’s collection of siliceous minerals. In this short film, Polly explains the geological processes by which they were made and some of the resulting characteristics that likely… Read More

Melancholy Little Gardens

Melancholy Little Gardens

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Lionel Wallace, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Door in the Wall (1906), was haunted by the vision of an enchanted garden glimpsed in childhood. Having eluded the vigilant and authoritative care of his nursery governess, he found himself wandering aimlessly among the long grey West Kensington roads until he… Read More