Tag: landscape

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I

The Wessex Project: Thomas Hardy, Architect: Part I

Kester Rattenbury

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

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

The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville

The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville

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

DMJ – From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps

Bernhard Siegert

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)

Power & Public Space 6: André Patrão – Eisenman, Derrida, and Chora L Works (Parc de la Villette)

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

Fernando Higueras: The Volcano, The Flower, and The Dromedary

Guillermo S. Arsuaga

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

The Ruined Temple and Oberrealta Chapel

Zachary Torres

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’

Drawing Out, Drawing In: Cartographies for ‘Out of the Sea’

Beth George

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

Charles Jencks: Architect in the Jumping Universe

Lily Jencks

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

The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci

Abilio Guerra

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

The Temple of Flora, Stourhead: a paradise revisited

Dudley Dodd

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

Alberto Ponis on Casa Scalesciani

Alberto Ponis

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