Tag: plan

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Aldo van Eyck: Diruit, aedificat, mutat quadrata rotundis

Laura Harty

‘He pulls down, he builds up, he exchanges square for round.‘Horace—Epistles. I. 1. 100[1] The Aldo van Eyck drawing currently on show at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields appears, at first glance, to do precisely this. A preliminary drawing, one made for the design of the architect’s own house, on transparent… Read More

Protected: Slaughterhouse as Spectacle

Protected: Slaughterhouse as Spectacle

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Adolf Loos: House Tzara, Paris, 1925-27

Ralf Bock

In 1924, Adolf Loos decided to leave Vienna and move his office to Paris. This decision was prompted by the politically motivated closure of the Settlement Office in Vienna. Loos had been the chief architect of the Settlement Office and was deeply committed to the settlers’ movement and the young… Read More

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Álvaro Siza: SAAL Bouça Housing, Porto 

Manuel Montenegro, Helen Thomas and Ellis Woodman

This drawing has two layers and two authors. Francisco Guedes de Carvalho made the draft perspective when he was a collaborator working in Siza’s office after studying under him at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto (FAUP). Guedes de Carvalho worked on the Bouça housing project both… Read More

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Sixty Metres, Sixty Degrees

Luis Callejas

This text is loosely based on the first part of my lecture ‘The Landscape Model,’ delivered at the Sverre Fehn-designed Hedmark Museum in October 2023. The lecture was part of the Sverre Fehn Symposium ‘Authoring Architecture in Time’ organised by AHO and the Hedmark Museum, and curated by Professor Mari… Read More

Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Richard Neutra at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Richard Neutra trained in Vienna, for a time under Karl Moser and Adolf Loos, did wartime service in Serbia, and spent six years working first in Switzerland with the landscape architect Gustav Ammann; then in Berlin—for the last two years as project manager for Erich Mendelsohn; and finally in Chicago… Read More

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Montano – Don’t Speak About Me

Cammy Brothers

Dear Niall, Before I forget, I wanted to send you the transcription from the Montano sheet. You can post it as my little discovery. Non dir di me se su di me non sai senza di te che poi di me dirai?Non fare ad aloro quello che a te non piace … Read More

Drawing as Travelogue

Drawing as Travelogue

Beth George and Emerald Wise

This is a rumination on memory, perceived worlds, and on drawing as embodied experience and shared conversation. While visiting Drawing Matter, we attended to and later remembered spaces both drawn and physical. Produced on the floor of a roof terrace in Sicily, we moved over the drawn field as a… Read More

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2024, ENAC Summer Workshop

Raffael Baur and Patricia Guaita

The following text recounts the week-long drawing workshop held at Shatwell Farm in August 2024. To read the students’ reflections and view their drawings, click here. To read invited expert Sergio Ekerman’s account of the two lectures he delivered throughout the week, click here. The 2024 ENAC Summer Workshop at… Read More

Peris+Toral Arquitectes: Modulus Matrix

Peris+Toral Arquitectes: Modulus Matrix

Peris+Toral Arquitectes

‘We were asked for one image that illustrated our thinking. The half that’s in white shows the final floor plan. The black shows the process, superimposing all the possibilities as we developed the project, exploring different options until the final crystallised version.’  Peris+Toral Arquitectes have been awarded the RIBA International… Read More

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

In the Archive: Riefenstahl, Hitler, Ebhardt, Sironi, Brasini

Editors

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. Premiered at this year’s La Biennale di Venezia, was Andres Veiel’s documentary on Leni Riefenstahl, the German film director known for Olympia (1936) and Triumph des Willens (1935). Framed through archival material Veil’s Riefenstahl (2024) demonstrates how her work was inextricably linked to… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 3

Nicholas Olsberg

This post concludes Nicholas Olsberg’s series on William Butterfield’s Heath’s Court project, the text of which is included in his new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024. ‘Sounding corridors’: entry and sequence The driveway brings us into a… Read More

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Retreat and Commemoration: Heath’s Court, 1878–82 – Part 1

Nicholas Olsberg

William Butterfield’s architectural practice, spanning the entire Victorian era, is the focus of Nicholas Olsberg’s new book The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times to be published by Lund Humphries in October 2024.  Over the next three weeks, Drawing Matter will reproduce a chapter within The Master Builder that focuses… Read More

Notes on Nabokov

Notes on Nabokov

Michael Becker

Between 1948 and 1958, Russian exile Vladimir Nabokov (a heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘knickerbocker’) taught a course at Cornell University called ‘Masters of European Fiction’. This drawing—one of a few that Nabokov would make as part of the course—depicts a map of James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Drawn are the intertwining… Read More

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

Editors and John Summerson

In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Fabric Object: Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas

Erin Besler, Marshall Brown, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith

The small exhibition Fabric Object, curated by Michael Meredith and exhibited at the Princeton University School of Architecture between 7th March and 3rd May 2024, brought together seven projects from the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. Short texts written by the Princeton School of Architecture faculty: Stan… Read More

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Seven Facets of Architectural Disegno

Cara Rachele

The following text was first presented at the 2021 edition of the Lucerne Talks, the biennial Symposium on Pedagogy in Architecture at HSLU’s School of Engineering and Architecture in Lucerne; Drawing Matter’s Niall Hobhouse and Matt Page also took part, with their text Quantum Collecting. It was later published as… Read More

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Drawings as Cosmovisions

Fernanda Canales

My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More

In the Archive: New and Found 4

In the Archive: New and Found 4

Editors

Click on drawings to move. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New On the digital planchest this time is a collection… Read More

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Ellie Skinner

This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More

The Poetry of Concrete

The Poetry of Concrete

Lina Bo Bardi

The following text is reproduced from the catalogue to Lina Bo Bardi: The Poetry of Concrete, an exhibition of the architect’s drawings at the Tchoban Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin (1.06.2024 – 22.09.2024). Find more information, and purchase the catalogue, here. I was born in Rome, in Prati di Castello,… Read More

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

French architect Louis-Hippolyte Lebas (1782–1867) trained with Percier and Fontaine, whose assistant he remained for some years; working in Paris, both independently and in collaboration with Éloi Labarre and others from the mid 1820s; professor of history of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1840; and leader of an… Read More

O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor

O.M. Ungers: Drawing a metaphor

Diogo Lopes and Fanny Noël

This drawing emerged within the framework of a summer school in Berlin, organized by Oswald Mathias Ungers for his Cornell students in 1977. The project was developed by the German architect together with his assistants, Peter Riemann, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kolhoff and Arthur Ovaska and it offers a vision for… Read More

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim

Carlos Martí Arís

Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More