Tag: interior
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra
20 May 2024
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra20 May 2024
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
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door
3 April 2024
Trevor Dannatt: St Mary’s Grove — Through the Door3 April 2024
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
Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building
8 November 2023
Fragments of a Polychrome Mosaic of a Roman Bath Building8 November 2023
This polychrome mosaic, discovered in 1872 in Rome near Termini train station, is the only mosaic depiction of a plan of a bath building known from the Roman period. Only three fragments were recovered, representing less than five percent of the original mosaic whose dimensions approximated 3.40 x 5.70 m. Two… Read More
Remembering Architecture
18 October 2023
Remembering Architecture18 October 2023
This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More
Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture
6 September 2023
Fraser Stables: Remembering Architecture 6 September 2023
Fraser Stables speaks quietly through his series Remembering Architecture. There is a staid documentarian quality to his photographs, but not that of architectural photography. When architectural details—the meeting of nature and architecture, light falling on surfaces—are made the focus, the images speak more to a sensitive process of recording moments; and in many… Read More
William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations
10 July 2023
William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations10 July 2023
This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. The town of Torquay dates from the days when… Read More
Hardman & Co.
9 June 2023
Hardman & Co.9 June 2023
My interest in seeing the Hardman & Co. drawings at Drawing Matter was quite personally motivated as I feel a connection to the company. Partially, because I come from Birmingham where the company was based, and because I visited the studios informally in the 1980s with my parents. I was… Read More
The First Exercise, One Door and One Window
1 June 2023
The First Exercise, One Door and One Window1 June 2023
In 2003, at the troubled age of eighteen, I started a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. The first semester was a disappointment, a disaster even. The extremely hierarchical and academic system in Italy was terribly discouraging for creativity and questioning. By raising your hand to… Read More
Abelardo Morell
6 April 2023
Abelardo Morell6 April 2023
In 2006 Abelardo Morell was invited by a collector with a Palazzo in Venice to photograph a camera obscura image of the Grand Canal in his mother’s bedroom. Morell returned to the city a year later. His host, pointing at a window in a Canaletto painting, said he knew a… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31 March 2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31 March 2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 1970
17 January 2023
Robert Bray: Design for a Playboy Duplex Penthouse, 197017 January 2023
Watch Philippa Lewis’s recent lecture, ‘From Drawing to Text’, on how we tell stories from architecture, for The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology here. Geoff Freeman, sales director of a Northamptonshire shoe company, arrives at JFK Airport for his flight… Read More
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture
1 May 2024
The Well-Constructed Joke: Comic Architecture1 May 2024
– Holger Kleine
This article first appeared in German: ‘Der gut gebaute Witz’ in Der Architekt 4/21 ‘Effekt und Affekt, Psychologie in der Architektur’ (2021), 60-63. 18 September 2021 Kurt W. Forster writing to Holger Kleine (translated from German) ‘… reading your essay on Paul Rudolph’s Hastings Hall. A fabulous piece, itself a kind of… Read More
theatre interior ornament