Tag: plan

Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ

Stanley Peach: Church Plan based on the Figure of Christ

Mireya Fabregas

Charles Stanley Peach’s watercolour over pencil painting is executed by overlaying two forms of religious representation: figural images over a church plan reflecting a ceiling plan. The figurative depictions narrate accounts of Christianity through various portrayals of Christ; the most prominent being God, benevolent, and Jesus crucified. Other portraits of… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS

Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample

This is the seventh 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. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More

Re-presenting the Rococo

Re-presenting the Rococo

David Valinsky

In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More

Charlotte Skene Catling: The Dairy House

Charlotte Skene Catling: The Dairy House

Françoise Astorg Bollack

This project involved the enlargement of a nineteenth-century masonry dairy house built by the owner’s great grandfather for the estate’s cheesemaker. The addition fills a narrow space dug into the hill behind the existing house providing additional bedrooms, bathrooms, and more generous circulation spaces. The building sits in an 850-acre… Read More

Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy

Sir John Soane’s Museum: Bound Legacy

Alexandra Politis

John Britton, a topographer and antiquarian by trade, began preparations to publish a guidebook to John Soane’s house-museum in 1825. The earliest mention of such an endeavour appears in a letter to Soane dated 3 November, in which Britton outlines his desire to ‘produce a vol to surprise the public, and… Read More

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery

Nicholas Logsdail

A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More

Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin

Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin

Quentin Nicolaï

The following conversation between the editors of Accattone and Quentin Nicolaï was first published in Accattone 6 (2019). It documents research carried out by Quentin Nicolaï in Abomey, Benin, between January 2014 and June 2018. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the magazine’s editors for allowing us reproduce… Read More

The Meaning of Lines

The Meaning of Lines

Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga

A series of seemingly abstract lines occupy the whole space of the paper. Each of them is formed by a thin black line that defines the geometry, accompanied by a thicker, semi-transparent brown line, which highlights it. Written annotations are placed on top, sometimes following the drawing’s wavy shape like… Read More

Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints

Vitruvius: Follow the Footprints

Paul Emmons

An intriguing Italian Renaissance drawing from the mid-sixteenth century has recently received critical attention through Drawing Matter. [1] Both the recto and the verso of the paper sheet have an ancient temple plan in perspective in a landscape setting, drawn in brown ink and attributed to the Sangallo circle as… Read More

Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered

Writing Prize 2020: Domestic Space, Registered

Laura Bonell and Daniel López-Dòriga

Around 200 AD, a map of the city of Rome was carved on marble at a scale of approximately 1:240. It measured 18 meters wide by 13 meters high and comprised 150 marble slabs hung on an interior wall of the Templum Pacis. The Forma Urbis Romae or Severan Marble Plan, as… Read More

Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin

Startha Éagsula: David Leech Architects on Barthélemy Enfantin

David Leech

The colourful ink and pencil drawing of Barthélemy Enfantin seeks to establish a set of rules for a new open metropolis. Without site, set out in all axes, and with the edges of the drawing alluding to a non-determined repetition, it was possibly drawn for continuous reuse and translation. Like… Read More

Bramante: Five Dots

Bramante: Five Dots

Guido Beltramini

The remote past is distant and faded. Original objects and documents that might be used to study it are scarce. They are often uncooperative and most of the time they don’t tell the truth, because they have been reframed by history’s ‘victors’ over the centuries. We must always bear in… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Startha Éagsula: Steve Larkin Architects on Walter Pichler

Steve Larkin

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. Friedrich… Read More

Trees Move In

Trees Move In

Sylvia Lavin

The following text is the second of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More

S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of

S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of

Gerard Carty, Elizabeth Hatz and Fionn O'Leary

In the Autumn of 2019, tutors Elizabeth Hatz and Gerard Carty visited the Drawing Matter archive with their fourth-year students from the School of Architecture and the University of Limerick (SAUL). Below is a record of their visit and its place in the context of the fourth-year studio. Tutors interested… Read More

The Empire State Building: Elevators (1931)

The Empire State Building: Elevators (1931)

Bassett Jones

The following was first published as ‘The Empire State Building: Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Architects: VIII. Elevators’, Architectural Forum (January 1931). Drawing Matter would like to thank Nicholas Olsberg for sending us this text. Digital copies of Architectural Forum’s series on the Empire State Building can be found at usmodernist.org.

Trees Make A Plan

Trees Make A Plan

Sylvia Lavin

The following text is the first of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More

Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued

Soane’s Designs for Combe House, Continued

Pierre du Prey

When Drawing Matter recently reproduced a preliminary ground plan for Combe House near Gittisham, Devon, by John Soane, I had a moment’s sudden recollection. Ptolemy Dean’s penetrating analysis of this precious if battered sheet of paper – entirely in the astonishingly fluid and energetic hand of the architect – set me to search… Read More

Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica

Notes on Port Royal, Jamaica

Paul Cox

My parents Oliver and Jean Cox were devoted ‘Jamaicophiles’, having worked on many projects in the country since the 1960s. One of the most enduring and absorbing was a proposed redevelopment of Port Royal as a renewal and upgrade of the historic city, rebuilding and restoring while making an interesting… Read More

Soane: Energy and Frustration

Soane: Energy and Frustration

Ptolemy Dean

This seemingly benign-looking plan is in fact a thrilling drawing. It shows Sir John Soane’s cerebral struggles in attempting to resolve a number of key competing design elements in the planning of a country house. The drawing exudes energy and frustration. The challenge of designing buildings symmetrically is hard work… Read More

A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti

A Smoky Monument / Saunamonumentti

Tuomas Toivonen

Small sauna is part of a peculiar farm, where architecture is important. Sheltered by dense vegetation, the site is located on a steep incline on the edge of a valley grooved by water in a landscape of rolling fields, above the residential building and barnyard of an old dairy farm.… Read More

Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)

Michael Graves’ Rooftop Village (1985)

David L. Gilbert

excerpted from The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985)

Working with Asplund

Working with Asplund

Herbert Korn

Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More

Hotel Sphinx (1978)

Hotel Sphinx (1978)

Rem Koolhaas

In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these projects are… Read More