Tag: DMC

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 1

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 1

Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson

This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversation held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: What led you to architecture to begin with, Peter? You began studying… Read More

Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto

Lapo Binazzi: Casa a Diacceto

Beatrice Lampariello

The design of Casa a Diacceto responds to the principle of ‘discontinuity’ theorised by Lapo Binazzi at the beginning of the 1970s: architecture can only be thought of and realised in fragments and pieces, there is no longer a coherent unity. The pieces are never invented, but are taken from… Read More

Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein

Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein

Matt Page

This text by Matt Page will be included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin again. Fail Better: Preliminary drawings in architecture (and art). The exhibition opens on the 31st May 2024 at the Kunstmuseum Olten, and includes nearly 100 drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. More information about the exhibition… Read More

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

French architect Louis-Hippolyte Lebas (1782–1867) trained with Percier and Fontaine, whose assistant he remained for some years; working in Paris, both independently and in collaboration with Éloi Labarre and others from the mid 1820s; professor of history of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1840; and leader of an… Read More

Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Mark Dorrian

‘Geometric, rigorously drawn, and yet always signed somewhere with an asymmetrical fold or knot.’[1] While this could be a concise description of Peter Wilson’s work, it is in fact Roland Barthes writing in his book Empire of Signs (1970) about what he described as the Japanese ‘ecstasy of the package’.[2] Barthes was struck by… Read More

Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra

Architectural Models and the Oriental Ideal of the Alhambra

Asun González Pérez

The Alhambra architectural models reflect the circumstances in which they were created, during the last years of the Romantic movement, when artists and patrons were fascinated by the diffuse idea of the ‘Orient’, somewhat embodied by the Alhambra. This part-myth, part-real palace was the ultimate destination for Romantic travellers and… Read More

Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture

Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture

Valerio Paolo Mosco

What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More

In the Archive: New and Found 3

In the Archive: New and Found 3

Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New There was excitement when Enzo Mari’s resin… Read More

Sugimoto and Architecture

Sugimoto and Architecture

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The early twentieth century saw a multifaceted blossoming of the avant-garde in Europe, with Dadaism, Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl… These movements also had an influence on architecture. Until the nineteenth century, people’s way of living was centred around religion. Much architectural decoration was developed in order to express the magnificence… Read More

A Bath for Immortality

A Bath for Immortality

Clara Maria Puglisi

It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

­­­Constant’s Ladders as Mythic Entity

Alison Bartlett

The ladder, a seemingly unexceptional instrument within the array of futuristic and utopian architectural schemes, sits front and centre; the protagonist of not only this drawing but of Constant’s almost two-decade-long project, spanning 1956–1974, entitled ‘New Babylon’. Propped somewhat haphazardly against a series of horizontally-connected and vertically-angled planes, it exudes… Read More

OMA: London—Foreplay

OMA: London—Foreplay

Richard Hall

This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More

DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata

DMJ – Enzo Mari, Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Enzo Mari’s Formazione Dinamica di una Sfera Reticolata (Dynamic Formation of a Reticulated Sphere), one of a series of objects produced under the title Relatione tra Contenuto e Contenitore (Relation between Content and Container), was manufactured by the Milanese company Danese between 1959 and 1963. It is a transparent polyester… Read More

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.S. Peach and the Cruciform Design of the Cathedral

C.M. Howell

In view here is a startling watercolour by Charles Stanley Peach, titled Plan of a Church Constructed on Divine Principles (1910)—his pictorial articulation of the cruciform layout of the Christian Cathedral. Architectural aspects are overlayed upon two images of Jesus. The first with his arms splayed wide, hands pinned to… Read More

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door

Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door

Adrian Dannatt

This is the sixth part of Adrian Dannatt’s series of reflections on his family home, frequently remodelled and extended over 45 years from 1955, by his father, the architect Trevor Dannatt. Read the introduction to the series, here. Entering the house the first thing one sees is the entrance door to my… Read More

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940), trained first at the Royal Institute of Technology (where he would teach from 1931), and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, undertook an extensive study tour of Greece and Italy, and opened his own practice around 1913, working entirely in Sweden, and… Read More

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Despite predictions of the… Read More

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things

Nanase Shirokawa

‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More

Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping

Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping

Tom Cookson

This text is an excerpt from Shallow Time: The Burren (Dpr-Barcelona and Irish Architecture Foundation, 2023), 73-74, written by Tom Cookson. The text is reproduced with permission from the Irish Architecture Foundation. How to communicate the topographic nature of landscape and lived experience on a map reproduced on paper? The composition… Read More

Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World

Houses for Printing: A Microcosm of the World

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Caterina Pincioni, secretary at… Read More

Architectural Covers: A Site of Design

Architectural Covers: A Site of Design

Sarah Hearne

The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Between 1971 and 1973,… Read More

Careful Crudeness

Careful Crudeness

Karen Olesen

At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More