Tag: landscape
The Sasada Lab
16.01.2023
The Sasada Lab16.01.2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
The City of Design
09.01.2023
The City of Design09.01.2023
Italy has remained a federation of city-states. There are museum cities and factory cities. There is a city whose streets are made of water and another where all streets are hollowed walls. There is a city where all its inhabitants work on the manufacture of equipment for amusement parks, a… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III
06.01.2023
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part III06.01.2023
This is the final of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as a young architect in London and Dorset. As he… Read More
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I
12.12.2022
The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I12.12.2022
This is the first of three extracts, each a series of vignette studies, that we will publish over the next few weeks; they are all taken from Kester Rattenbury’s fascinating full-length study: The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect, which approaches the great author from the perspective of his first career as… Read More
Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog
07.12.2022
Useless Terrain: The Ballynagrenia and Ballinderry Bog07.12.2022
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
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville
23.11.2022
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville23.11.2022
– Editors
Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York, was one of three co-operative Usonian communities founded in the late 1940s. The other two, The Acres (also known as Galesburg Country Homes) and Parkwyn Village were both near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They all involved Frank Lloyd Wright as the overall site planner and in each… Read More
DMJ – From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps
15.11.2022
DMJ – From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps15.11.2022
This text, published alongside Jonathan Foote’s article ‘Borromini’s Smudge’, marks the launch of the first and second issues of DMJournal–Architecture and Representation. Over the coming months, we will be publishing articles from both DMJ 1: The Geological Imagination and DMJ 2: Drawing Instruments/Instrumental Drawings. The Geological Imagination will be published… Read More
Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)
22.07.2022
Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)22.07.2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and André Patrão
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: Parc de la Villette was emblematic of the strong ties made between the disciplines of architecture and philosophy in the 1980s, where… Read More
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary
09.05.2022
Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary09.05.2022
From eighteenth century primitive huts to the rise of barn living in the 1970s, buildings have served as the conceptual boundary between primordial formlessness and the organised world. But what if architecture begins with the very nature that it was invented to exclude? In 1971, the Madrilenian architect Fernando Higueras… Read More
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel
14.04.2022
The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel14.04.2022
The plans of the Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel were drawn nearly two hundred years apart, and yet they both speak to the Ruskian timelessness of the ruin. The temple and chapel are representative of their respective ages, with the former alluding to Romanticism’s longing for a pastoral past free… Read More
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’
24.03.2022
Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’24.03.2022
The provocation for this essay is Drawing Matter’s own: ‘we take the word “drawing” to be as much a verb as a noun…’ Drawing describes an act and a thing: both a process and the outcome of that process. There aren’t many English words like it, and many of them… Read More
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe
25.01.2022
Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe25.01.2022
Gardens have always been the location to contemplate and speculate on man’s place in nature. Gardens bring the macrocosm into the microcosm by the necessity of being a living place, connecting to the wider rhythms, ecological networks, or the even more abstract forces that create our world. When Charles and… Read More
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci
13.12.2021
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci13.12.2021
Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little houseStill neighbors a streamAnd still harbors its arbors Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little homeCooks on the coal cookerThe wood stove’s still blown[…] Where sertão remainsEvery little house is gladfor on the evenings we get our Hail-MaryAnd the pleasure of being alone ‘Casinha feliz’,… Read More
The Temple of Flora, Stourhead: A Paradise Revisited
09.12.2021
The Temple of Flora, Stourhead: A Paradise Revisited09.12.2021
In 1744 Henry Hoare employed Henry Flitcroft to design a temple for his magnificent Palladian gardens at Stourhead: The Temple of Flora, which was built by William Privett in 1744–5. Excerpted below is an account of the temple’s history taken from Dudley Dodd’s book, Stourhead: Henry Hoare’s Paradise Revisited (2021). Purchase… Read More
Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani
27.10.2021
Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani27.10.2021
The site chosen by Juan S., an Argentinian with a penchant for Italy, was almost alarmingly steep and sheer above the sea. Even the path leading to it was perilous, and trodden with bated breath. During our long conversations about where the house would be built, we were not so… Read More
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum
04.10.2021
Twelve Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Two KM of Continuum04.10.2021
There is a handwritten phrase in red ink at the bottom of this sketch, which reads in Italian: ‘for the continuous monument (genesis)’. This drawing is from one of Adolfo Natalini’s sketchbooks and depicts a series of studies about the earth. In the same sketchbook, he drew multiple sequences of… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas
28.07.2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 16: Luis Callejas28.07.2021
This is the sixteenth 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. Here, Luis Callejas (LCLA OFFICE) discusses his teaching studios at the Yale School of Architecture and the… Read More
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal
24.05.2021
Superstudio & Piranesi: Zeno is Immortal24.05.2021
It’s 1777 in the Italian region of Salerno, a man is resting on a massive Doric column, watching his two cows from the ruin of a temple where the weeds grow. This building was, a long time ago, considered as the house of Juno, goddess of fertility and the vital… Read More
Nobuo Sekine: Phase of Nothingness
27.04.2021
Nobuo Sekine: Phase of Nothingness27.04.2021
– Editors
With thanks to Nicholas Olsberg for sending us this tribute to Sekine written on the first anniversary of the artist’s death (linked here).
Balzac architecte (1856)
09.04.2021
Balzac architecte (1856)09.04.2021
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound
08.04.2021
Nancy Holt: Sky Mound08.04.2021
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. A pioneer of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she… Read More
Hans Hollein: From a Distance
07.04.2021
Hans Hollein: From a Distance07.04.2021
On a page of Hans Hollein’s sketchbook, a cluster of adobe buildings climb slowly and modestly above the horizon, seeming to rise out of the earth. The sketch, produced in 1960 during the Austrian architect’s exploration of the western United States, feels unorthodox for Hollein, whose proclivity for radical, anti-Functionalist… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17.02.2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17.02.2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio
18.01.2023
Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio18.01.2023
– Nicholas Olsberg
This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More
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