Tag: education

Masterplanning the University of London

Masterplanning the University of London

Bill Sherman

Legend has it that Charles Holden promised the University of London a building that would last five hundred years. While there is no hard evidence for Holden’s claim, his Senate House (1932–37) looks as permanent as anything built in modern Britain. A 19-storey tower faced with granite and Portland stone,… Read More

Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury

Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury

Bill Sherman and Richard Temple

Quoted from the exhibition text of Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus, curated by Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute and Richard Temple, Archivist of the University of London. The exhibition continues until 17 March in the Chancellor’s Hall Lobby, First Floor, Senate House. More information here.… Read More

François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’

François Cointeraux: the Architect of the ‘Agricultural Proletariat’

Anja Segmüller

François Cointeraux was born in Lyon in 1740 and was introduced to agriculture and construction at an early age through his family’s business ventures. When his uncle designated him the ‘universal heir’ of his company, Cointeraux inherited several buildings in Lyon and around 24 houses in the area. His marriage… Read More

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Nicholas Olsberg

This project scrapbook traces the publication and exhibition history of Richard Neutra’s experimental Corona Avenue School, built in 1935 after the Los Angeles earthquake of 1933. The material for this scrapbook has been compiled by Nicholas Olsberg; his earlier text on the school for Drawing Matter can be read here.

W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education

W. R. Lethaby: Apprenticeship and Education

Hugh Strange

This is the fourth text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. The building sites of London in the late nineteenth century desperately lacked adequate skills, and this need was being addressed neither on the job nor through appropriate training. The first prospectus of… Read More

Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog

Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog

Joseph Heffernan

Every hectare of drained peatland emits two tonnes of carbon a year. Known peatlands only cover about 3% of the world’s land surface, but they store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. Cutting turf for fuel has been practiced for centuries, and communities have… Read More

Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022

Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022

Peter Wilson

Remote teaching as a pandemic consequence has already been a theme for Drawing Matter, in the January 2022 Melbourne University Venice Workshop it reached an almost surreal zenith. Remoteness is fundamental to Australia, whether the extreme separations of the outback or a pre-digital geographic estrangement from global cultural discourses. At… Read More

The Cod of São Victor

The Cod of São Victor

Pedro Bandeira

The following text on Mário Ramos and Fernando Barroso’s student work at the Porto School is excerpted from the publication Porto School, B Side 1968–1978 (An Oral History) (CIAJG & Documenta, 2014).  Jacinto Rodrigues recalls that in 1976 Mário Ramos, Fernando Barroso, Graça Nieto Guimarães and Maria de Lurdes Mendonça developed a project to… Read More

Power & Public Space 7: Mabel O. Wilson – Memorial to Enslaved Labourers, University of Virginia

Power & Public Space 7: Mabel O. Wilson – Memorial to Enslaved Labourers, University of Virginia

Matthew Blunderfield and Mabel O. Wilson

Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: In 2020 The Memorial to Enslaved Labourers opened at the University of Virginia, designed as a collaboration between Höweler+Yoon Architecture, Mabel O.… Read More

Clancy Moore: Less is more

Clancy Moore: Less is more

Chris Foges

This linked text is part of an ongoing series that records the building projects undertaken at Shatwell Farm. For more on the Shatwell Project, click here.

The Evolving Role of Drawing

The Evolving Role of Drawing

Nicholas Olsberg

This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Roz Barr

Options Studio was an Elective Module at Cornell University led by Roz Barr. The act of making means engaging with an idea that can be made, unmade, and reconsidered before being realised. Model-making has a critical role in formulating and realising an idea. Materiality and form are developed through discussions… Read More