Tag: graphic design
Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)
29 June 2022
Jan Tschichold and El Lissitzky: Foto-Auge (Photo-eye)29 June 2022
Although not a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Jan Tschichold was appointed to the selection committee for the Werkbund’s Film und Foto exhibition (FiFo), to be held in Stuttgart between May and June 1929. FiFo was one of the most ambitious attempts to showcase recent developments in photography. The… Read More
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan
1 February 2022
Postmodern Australia: Robert Pearce’s Drawings for Edmond and Corrigan1 February 2022
Writing in Cities of Hope (1993), the historian Conrad Hamann relates that, on mentioning to Robert Venturi the name of the Australian postmodernist architect Peter Corrigan, the first words from Venturi’s mouth were ‘Oh God! Corrigan!’. Yet it must be made clear that to Corrigan, and to his wife and… Read More
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams
12 January 2022
Infinite Patterns in I. M. Pei’s Furniture Diagrams12 January 2022
In 1969, the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, was completed in the small town of Columbus, Indiana. According to project architect Ken Carruthers, who was obsessed with the golden ratio, the building rigorously employs ancient proportional systems. Fully opaque on its east and west… Read More
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould
11 January 2022
Essex Coastal Cornice: Ex-Mould11 January 2022
The cover of early editions of John Summerson’s book The Classical Language of Architecture features a curious drawing of a Doric entablature. To all intents and purposes the profile of the entablature is correct, but it has been extruded through the method of oblique projection. It is as if we… Read More
Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance
4 November 2021
Writing Prize 2021: Itsuko Hasegawa, Capturing an Infinite Distance4 November 2021
Negatives Of the 120,027 items included in the archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, 16,010 are part of the collection called ‘Architecture’, and 22,877 are filed as ‘Negative film’. Astonishingly, only one entry sits in both: ‘Ensemble de 12 négatifs couleur (4 pour le projet Bizan, 6 pour le… Read More
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition
13 October 2021
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition13 October 2021
– Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo
This conversation between Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo was first published, in German translation, in issue 238 of ARCH+ (March 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the editors of ARCH+ for allowing us to publish the original English version of the text. Momoyo Kaijima: With… Read More
Signature
15 February 2021
Signature15 February 2021
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
Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered
5 December 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered5 December 2020
– Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga
Around 200 AD, a map of the city of Rome was carved on marble at a scale of approximately 1:240. It measured 18 meters wide by 13 meters high and comprised 150 marble slabs hung on an interior wall of the Templum Pacis. The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan, as… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War
29 September 2020
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War29 September 2020
Niccolò Machiavelli concludes his treatise on the art of war (Dell’Arte della Guerra, 1521) with a series of diagrammatic ‘figures’ illustrating the arrangements of troops known as ordinanze. Rather than using human silhouettes, the ordinanza links alphabetical signs to specific roles and positions of the soldiers, reducing the army to… Read More
W. E. B. Du Bois’ visionary infographics
2 June 2020
W. E. B. Du Bois’ visionary infographics2 June 2020
In 1900 W.E.B. Du Bois travelled to the Exposition Universelle in Paris to present the ‘American Negro’, an exhibition that sought ‘to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings’. In addition to Du Bois, then… Read More
Architectural Typefaces
29 May 2020
Architectural Typefaces29 May 2020
It is a drawing of a C. A rather normal looking C, a bit condensed perhaps. Its thick and thin parts are distributed along a vertical axis, rather than a diagonal one, so in typographic terms it is a modern C. To me it also looks a bit British, because it only… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS
25 February 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS25 February 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
This is the seventh in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More
sketch plan projection (axonometric isometric) publication graphic design education public space Pan Scroll Zoom (series)