Tag: plan

Architectural Manuals and Pacific Speculations

Architectural Manuals and Pacific Speculations

Sarah Treadwell

Lodged in an architectural archive at the bottom of the world, [1] Joshua Kirby’s 1755 book, Perspective of Architecture: a work entirely new […] announces that ‘All those lines that are boundaries to the several parts of Architecture, are either straight or circular; and therefore, those two different kinds of… Read More

Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings exploring the relationship between form, space and programme. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Peter Wilson: Ponte dell’Accademia

Adrian Hawker

In the years prior to the commencement of his major built works, Bridgebuilding No.4 Ponte dell’Accademia holds a critical position within the formative projects of the architect Peter Wilson. The design was prepared in response to an open international architecture competition that was launched under Aldo Rossi’s directorship of the… Read More

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Construction: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on construction drawings by architects architects and designers. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live in the Drawing… Read More

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Drawing Sites: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

This audio recording documents a workshop on architects’ drawings in which the site is the designer’s focus. It was delivered by Manuel Montenegro and Niall Hobhouse to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The recording was made live… Read More

fala: butterflies

fala: butterflies

fala

This is the final of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Every discussion ends in a few drawn lines as words don’t do the job as well. A project is usually sketched between the lines that… Read More

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

W. R. Lethaby: The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople

Hugh Strange

This is the third text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. William Lethaby’s second book, The Church of Sancta Sophia, Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, published in 1894, could hardly have started on its subject more emphatically, ‘Sancta Sophia is the most… Read More

DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge

DMJ – Borromini’s Smudge

Jonathan Foote

This text, published alongside Bernhard Siegert’s article ‘From Landscape to Mapscape: Robert Smithson’s Maps’ 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… Read More

fala: comprehensive

fala: comprehensive

fala

This is the second of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. Normally, a project is depicted through a series of plans, sections, elevations, and some axonometric drawings, perhaps – every aspect of it explained and documented. We… Read More

fala: the single line

fala: the single line

fala

This is the first of eight articles in which the partners at fala examine different approaches to drawing and imagery within their practice as designers. It started from a rather liberating decision to omit thicknesses. Gradually, all the information that wasn’t central to our thinking was removed, avoiding any celebration… Read More

Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle

Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle

Francesco Paini

This drawing is a print of a hand drawing I made eighteen years ago on a roll of tracing paper. The original drawing, made with rapidograph pens and a pencil, is now lost. Last month this blueprint was moved to Drawing Matter’s archive. Drawing Matter asked me to explain why… Read More

William Burges: Architectural drawing

William Burges: Architectural drawing

Editors

William Burges was elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1860 and to its council in 1862. The text reproduced below is the transcript of the paper he delivered upon joining the RIBA. Reproduced from Transactions v.9-11(1858–1861), digitised by the University of Illinois, here.

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Mark Dorrian and Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Drawing Matter is delighted to present three texts by Alberto Pérez-Gómez on architecture and its representation, the first writings by him to be carried on the Drawing Matter website. The first, ‘Architecture as Drawing’, is an early essay that initially appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1982, a… Read More

Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (2021) – Review

Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (2021) – Review

Anthony Vidler

From the frescoes of Pompeii to the Great Hall of Siedlecin, from the Book of Kells to the Book of Hours, architecture has been depicted in full colour. Where colour has been largely absent in the history of architectural representation, however, is in the more technical drawings of architects themselves.… Read More

Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn

Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn

Michael Merrill

Extracted, with permission, from Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing edited by Michael Merrill, published by Lars Müller Publishers © 2021. Click here to read a review of this book by Stan Allen. An auspicious meeting: At the end of 1955, a thirty-five-year-old academic named Colin Rowe visited the office… Read More

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing (2021) – Review

Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing (2021) – Review

Stan Allen

I’ll confess, I ordered a copy of this book reluctantly. I had received one of those ‘We think you might be interested…’ notices, but my bookshelves are overburdened, and already include a number of books on Kahn, among them one of Michael Merrill’s previous collaborations with Lars Müller, Louis Kahn:… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

George Saumarez Smith

As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More

Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi

Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi

António Choupina

Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More

Sir John Soane’s Involvement in House Flipping

Sir John Soane’s Involvement in House Flipping

Frances Sands

Any architectural scheme with a lone surviving drawing is likely to be confounding. The lack of graphic context can easily lead to misunderstanding, as was the case for Sir John Soane’s work on 28 Bruton Street. It is my privilege to care for Soane’s drawings collection, and I felt quite… Read More

Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment

Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment

Fabio Colonnese

The following is an excerpt from Fabio Colonnese’s essay, ‘Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment’, published in Digital Modernism Heritage Lexicon (Springer Tracts, 2021). The editors have prefaced this with a short summary of the full essay. The essay describes transparent paper and its operative… 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 Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast

Sebastiano Brandolini

Alberto Ponis was born in Genoa in 1933. He took his architecture degree in Florence in 1960. His father, Mario Alberto, had founded the M.I.T.A. (Manifattura Italiana Tappeti Artistici) in 1926 in Nervi, near Genoa. The company’s building was built by Luigi Daneri in 1940. Gio Ponti, Arnaldo Pomodoro and… Read More