Tag: elevation
Cartography of a Wound
06.08.2026
Cartography of a Wound06.08.2026
How do you draw a diamond mine? How do you depict a wound on the terrain, a spiral of extraction so powerful that it reorganises entire territories? On the sheet, the mine becomes a self-contained world—a floating territory of pits, conveyor belts, processing sheds, and housing blocks—but it also acts… Read More
Collection Guide: Cedric Price
03.08.2026
Collection Guide: Cedric Price03.08.2026
– Editors
Cedric Price (1934–2003) studied architecture at Cambridge University before receiving his diploma from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1957. He went on to teach at the AA and worked in the offices of Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before founding his own practice in 1960. Though the majority of Price’s… Read More
Three Drawings
24.07.2026
Three Drawings24.07.2026
This first drawing is not ours. It is a clumsy sketch that clients brought to our first meeting. Although not particularly legible, let alone well-proportionated, it carried the noble ambition of speaking about many things at once: it addressed everything, everywhere, all at once. Close inspection revealed three floor plans,… Read More
Gothic Design(ation)s
08.07.2026
Gothic Design(ation)s08.07.2026
Towards the end of an illustrious career as an administrator, an ambassador, a royal confidant, and one of the wealthiest men in Europe, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester (1447/8–1528) followed in the footsteps of many a medieval grandee eager to ensure an enduring legacy, which is to say he commissioned… Read More
Protected: Colour in Architectural Drawings
29.06.2026
Protected: Colour in Architectural Drawings29.06.2026
– Editors
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
My Parish Drawings
19.05.2026
My Parish Drawings19.05.2026
From an early age I was in love with China and all things Chinese. I don’t know what inspired this passion, but a few years ago I came upon a Rupert Bear cartoon strip and there was the Emperor of China aloft on a flying carpet. I know my father… Read More
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni
06.05.2026
Protected: Collection Guide: Carlo Marchionni06.05.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The House Stands Still While Life Moves
17.04.2026
The House Stands Still While Life Moves17.04.2026
The house has a floor sticky like honey; our feet cling to it and we cannot get away from it. The house is a rucksack so huge and full on our shoulders that every movement becomes impossible. The house is an unconditional refuge for those who fear all the mishaps… Read More
Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio
13.04.2026
Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio13.04.2026
– Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh
In his conversation with Don Wall in Mask of Medusa, John Hejduk recalls the programme of the Schatzalp sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. ‘[…] the hero is going up the mountain in a carriage in the deep snow, he sees the dead bodies of those who had died in the sanatorium… Read More
Wedging a Shrine
10.04.2026
Wedging a Shrine10.04.2026
This drawing by an unknown author can be appreciated from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it depicts a jinja, a Japanese Shinto shrine. From a historical point of view, the image can be read as an ezu—an illustrated map from the late Edo period (mid-nineteenth century)—featuring premodern calligraphy and the… Read More
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House
19.03.2026
Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House19.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House
13.03.2026
The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House13.03.2026
The sole drawing by Sergei Eisenstein in the Drawing Matter archive is a set design for a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) from 1922. It is a rare, interdisciplinary confluence of a socialist Irish playwright (Shaw), a Russian filmmaker and theorist (Eisenstein), and a radical theatre maker… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop
15.01.2026
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop15.01.2026
– Raffael Baur, Patricia Guaita and Matthew Wells
For a fourth year, Drawing Matter hosted students from ENAC EPFL for a week-long workshop on survey drawings—this time not in a Somerset farmyard, but in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 400 yards east of the archive. The workshop was organised by Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur in collaboration with Drawing Matter,… Read More
The Many Lives of the Open Hand
08.12.2025
The Many Lives of the Open Hand08.12.2025
Saturday afternoon, 4pm, the summer heat. My father revs up the engines of his Fiat 1100, his pride and joy. It is the early 1970s and I am in my pre-teens. Small for my age, I squeeze into the front seat, between my parents. I am not welcome in the… Read More
The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building
04.12.2025
The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 04.12.2025
‘Paris, 1927. I was in Lurçat’s studio on the rue Bonaparte looking for the first time at reproductions of the ‘Health House’ of Neutra. We young followers of the new architecture were both admiring and astounded by this signal of a revolution in building.’ Willy Boesiger, introducing Richard Neutra. Buildings and Projects (Zurich:… Read More
Collection Guide: The Viennese School
18.11.2025
Collection Guide: The Viennese School18.11.2025
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
Collection Guide: William Butterfield
25.09.2025
Collection Guide: William Butterfield25.09.2025
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
Fabric Fabrications
27.08.2025
Fabric Fabrications27.08.2025
Interpretation I am very grateful to Mark Dorrian for his reading of my 1977 drawing. [1] While at the time of its laborious production, the word shroud was not uppermost as my intended coding, I can now see that the dark, drawn folds have a real, symbolic or imaginary resonance—subsequently… Read More
Melancholy Little Gardens
04.08.2025
Melancholy Little Gardens04.08.2025
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
Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência
03.07.2025
Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge. The São Salvador de Figueredo Parish Church by Paulo Providência03.07.2025
The book Architecture as Poetics of Knowledge is essential reading for anyone interested in Paulo Providência’s renovation of the parish church of São Salvador, Figueredo, 1992-2002, as well as for understanding his singular architectural poetics. A beautifully published suite of drawings (29 pages, including 4 foldouts) and photographs (34 pages) is supported… Read More
Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)
16.05.2025
Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)16.05.2025
Introduction A steady trickle of works on Dom Hans Van der Laan has appeared in the years since his passing in 1991. Most important among these, Richard Padovan has presented a compelling argument for the significance of Van der Laan’s theory of proportion through a series of texts, including Dom… Read More
Collection Guide: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
13.05.2025
Collection Guide: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe13.05.2025
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The drawings archive held by Mies at the time of his death was placed in the Museum of Modern Art, and his correspondence and papers at the Library of Congress. They constitute a comprehensive record of his works after the opening of his practice in the United States, especially for… Read More
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process
23.07.2026
Eye, Hand and Mind: An Interview on the Drawing Process 23.07.2026
– Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle
The following conversation between Bryan Cantley and Helen Castle, publishing director at RIBA, was conducted on 30 December 2021 and has been adapted from a text, originally presented in Speculative Coolness: Architecture, Media, the Real, and the Virtual (Routledge, 2023). It traces the development of Cantley’s experimental drawing practice through Form:uLA—a body of work sustained since… Read More
elevation model plan sketch theoretical & imaginary