Tag: drawing matter writing prize 2020

Signature

Signature

André Patrão

It’s just a small loose sheet of paper ripped off a notepad. Along its margins, an elegant round-cornered brown border, once enclosing an anonymous blank space of empty expectancy, now ceremoniously frames a mysteriously attractive, harmonious, yet utterly cryptic mark, struck and left upon its surface: a signature. By whose… Read More

Mother of all drawings

Mother of all drawings

Deepiga Kameswaran

The very first attempts of humans to express their thoughts can be seen in prehistoric cave paintings. From these rudimentary markings to modern-day coding, the human race has evolved to acquire many skills. Still, none of us are born fully equipped with this skillset; we must repeat this process of learning… Read More

Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy

Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy

Alexandra Politis

John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More

The Architect and the Matador

The Architect and the Matador

Thomas Gould

On one sheet, a matador;on the other, a design,with measurements for a cathedral pier.  What unites these drawingsis provenance:both, apparently, executedby the architectEugène Viollet-le-Ducin meetings.  As Viollet-le-Duc’s mind wanderedfrom doodle to design,my attention,beholding the drawings,is drawn between the two sheets; drawn, by the insistently connective impulseof looking,into associations.  Between architect… Read More

Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space

Drawing the Curtain: Entangling rendering and theatrical space

Thomas Hutton

Pliny the Elder recounted the following story in Naturalis Historia: The two great painters of classical Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater painter. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting, the grapes he depicted appeared so real that a bird flew down to peck at them. When… Read More

Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center

Carlos Diniz and the World Trade Center

Sam van Strien

The landmark skyscrapers of SOM, the deconstructivism of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and the corporate modernist master plan of the World Trade Center all have something in common: long before they were constructed, they were represented in drawings by Carlos Diniz.  In 1962, the architect Minoru Yamasaki hired Diniz… Read More

Hello Iwona

Hello Iwona

Hamish Lonergan

A large, red ‘Hello!!’ and attribution to ‘Gowan, James’ is all I can see, at first, of image 3157.3r in Drawing Matter’s online archive. No date, no caption. The greeting is enthusiastic enough to stop scrolling: ‘Hi there, James!!’ I think. But when I zoom in, it’s not him at all. … Read More

The House and the Sketch

The House and the Sketch

Bijan Thornycroft

288 sketches precede the design of a house. Each one starts again from zero. None for more than a few seconds. Never larger than a few centimeters. With each repetition of the loop, the house searches for itself. For the first 287 pages, it did not know what it was… Read More

Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse

Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse

Thomas Gould

In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral.  Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Chloe Spiby Loh

‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More

Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction

Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Architecture of Abstraction

Nicholas Andrew Pacula

Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor series may rightly be called barbaric. ‘Barbarism? Yes indeed,’ writes Walter Benjamin in his 1933 essay, Experience and Poverty. ‘We say this in order to introduce a new positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the… Read More

The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic

The Discreet Charm of the Bureaucratic

Michael Abrahamson

When Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew a crooked line between the architecture of genius and the architecture of bureaucracy in a famous essay of 1947, he could hardly have predicted that within two decades, neo-avant-gardists around the world would embrace bureaucratic architecture because of its liberatory capacities—precisely the opposite reading of what… Read More