Tag: presentation

Protected: An Interview with David Connor

Protected: An Interview with David Connor

Gianni Botsford and David Connor

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Analogous City: Panel

The Analogous City: Panel

Aldo Rossi

Having been asked to write about the panel exhibited at the Venice Biennale—entitled The analogous city, a joint work carried out with my friends Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart—it is worthwhile, I feel, posing a few general questions that arise prior to experiments or results of this kind.… Read More

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Franco Purini: Drawings of Imagination

Lina Malfona

‘The drawing represents the medianic exploration of the shaded side of reason and, contradictorily, the scene of an ideal landscape in which the architect believes he will be happy. As the place of theoretical truth, the drawing institutes itself independently of architecture. Superior to architecture by the fact that it… Read More

Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing

Reading Las Vegas: An Oral History of Drawing

Denise Scott Brown and Ariel Koltun-Fromm

The following interview is excerpted from a longer conversation between Ariel Koltun-Fromm and Denise Scott Brown which took place in April 2024 at her home in Philadelphia. It is part of a larger research project by Ariel investigating drawing as a means of interrogating existing places.  * Ariel Koltun-Fromm (AKF):… Read More

‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

‘Not only a Building but also a City’ 

Karl Kinsella

At the end of the twelfth century, Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), never one to mince his words, complained about a new fad of making drawings to illustrate biblical passages. Why, he wondered, were people creating convoluted diagrams to illustrate the ‘things’ that appear in the Bible, all those vessels, beasts,… Read More

Collection Guide: John Ruskin

Collection Guide: John Ruskin

Editors

Drawing Matter holds a mineral collection compiled by John Ruskin for the St David’s Boys’ Preparatory School in Reigate, Surrey. The school later relocated to Stone House in Broadstairs and the mineral collection moved with it. Donated in 1883, the specimens were chosen from Ruskin’s personal collection, yet his idea… Read More

Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation

Michael Gold: The Dialogue of Representation

Michael Gold and Dalibor Vesely

The following text, ‘The Dialogue of Representation’ by Dalibor Vesely, was published in People in Architecture, the book featuring the exhibition of work by Michael Gold’s AA Unit 5 students held at the Architectural Association, 4–29 October 1983. Read a response to the exhibition by Peter Wilson here.  Drawing Matter… Read More

Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Editors

Cedric Price (1934–2003) studied architecture at Cambridge University before receiving his diploma from the Architectural Association (AA) in 1957. He went on to teach at the AA and worked in the offices of Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before founding his own practice in 1960.  Though the majority of Price’s… Read More

The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries

The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries

John Walter

This unknown eighteenth-century French textile sample pattern book is an intriguing addition to the Drawing Matter collection. Is it architecture, or is it here through a taxonomic error? Either way, how should we approach reading it within this architectural context? The book opens to roughly A3 in format, and each… Read More

Three Drawings

Three Drawings

atelier local

This first drawing is not ours. It is a clumsy sketch that clients brought to our first meeting. Although not particularly legible, let alone well-proportionated, it carried the noble ambition of speaking about many things at once: it addressed everything, everywhere, all at once. Close inspection revealed three floor plans,… Read More

Collection Guide: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Collection Guide: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

Martin Bressani

The French Neo-Gothic architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century architecture worldwide. He transformed the restoration and interpretation of medieval monuments, championed structural rationalism, and reinvented drawing and publishing as tools for disseminating architectural knowledge. By the time of his death, he had become the… Read More

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

An Attardé Draftsman: Giacomo Beverati

Manuel Orazi

‘In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection’ —Andrei Tarkovsky Italian culture has always produced artists who were attardé, either… Read More

Protected: Colour in Architectural Drawings

Protected: Colour in Architectural Drawings

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The Temple

Protected: The Temple

Clive Aslet

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Mapping Water

Mapping Water

Anna Biza

Some years ago, I travelled to Egypt and visited the Suez Canal—the international water passage that connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. While standing on a small pier in Ismailia, I watched the huge cargo ships passing; the canal seemed more like a water highway. At the same time,… Read More

Collection Guide: Peter Wilson & BOLLES+WILSON

Collection Guide: Peter Wilson & BOLLES+WILSON

Editors

Peter Wilson and Julia Bolles are the founding partners of Architekturbüro BOLLES+WILSON. Peter Wilson was born in Australia, he studied architecture at the University of Melbourne and the Architectural Association, where he later taught from 1974–1988 (Diploma Unit Master 1980–88). Julia Bolles was born in Münster and graduated from the Karlsruhe Institute of… Read More

Unseen Bodies

Unseen Bodies

Christine Bjerke

This drawing explores how the human body has been depicted, understood, and imagined in Danish architectural and design education over the past 270 years. It represents a study of more than two hundred public and private archival materials sourced from various contemporary educational institutions, libraries, and archives across Denmark.[1] The… Read More

The Primacy of Drawing

The Primacy of Drawing

Roger Malbert

The Primacy of Drawing, Deanna Petherbridge’s magisterial survey of the place of drawing in European art since the Renaissance, was first published by Yale University Press in 2010. Weighing in at 520 pages, it was a formidable achievement of vast erudition and profound insight, the fruits of more than two… Read More

Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds

Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds

Peter Sealy

In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes the first hundred pages of his bestselling 1980 novel as a form of penance, ‘for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterwards.’[1] Beyond creating an easy heuristic for who should or should not descend further into the world of… Read More

Vanbrugh in the Best Light: Sir John Soane’s Lecture Drawings of Blenheim Palace

Vanbrugh in the Best Light: Sir John Soane’s Lecture Drawings of Blenheim Palace

Frances Sands

The architect Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) is currently enjoying a moment in the sun! 2026 marks the tercentenary of his death and a variety of activities have been organised to celebrate and reassess this most dynamic of British architects, under the banner of ‘Vanbrugh 300’, which is being coordinated by… Read More

Owen Luder: Sunderland Stadium

Owen Luder: Sunderland Stadium

Owen Hopkins

Apart from the extraordinary dynamism of the composition, one of the most striking things about this drawing of Owen Luder’s design for a new stadium for Sunderland A.F.C. is that the people heading towards the turnstiles aren’t wearing red and white. Indeed, the figures are not your usual football fans—today,… Read More

The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

Editors

In the first three months of 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum presented a small exhibition dedicated to Le Corbusier’s unrealised Olympic Stadium Project for Baghdad. The show was organised by the RIBA, Irena Murray, and Peter Carl, with work loaned from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Fondation… Read More

Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Stan Allen

The first thing to be said about the drawings of Carlos Bedoya is that this is not an exercise in nostalgia, or a case for the lost art of drawing by hand. The architects of PRODUCTORA work in the present, with all the tools and techniques available to them. The… Read More

Drawing Superpositions

Drawing Superpositions

Leo Julin

When drawing plans for a project that does not primarily form architectural space through solid mass, the question of what a line signifies becomes especially critical. This drawing faced the challenge of representing an object that produces light and sound, situated in the public space of Vårby Gård, a suburb… Read More