Tag: presentation

Protected: The Viennese School at Drawing Matter

Protected: The Viennese School at Drawing Matter

Iain Boyd Whyte

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Building with Writing

Building with Writing

Stan Allen

Stan Allen’s exhibition Building with Writing, an installation documenting 40 years of writing and drawing practice, is currently presented at the Graham Foundation as part of the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial, led by Florencia Rodríguez, Artistic Director, and Igo Kommers Wender, Associate Curator.  The exhibition was curated by Michael Meredith, with… Read More

Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter

Protected: Zaha Hadid at Drawing Matter

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

William Butterfield at Drawing Matter

William Butterfield at Drawing Matter

Nicholas Olsberg

William Butterfield was a British architect who trained first as a builder’s apprentice and then as an architect in offices at London and Worcester before opening his own London studio in 1838, continuing in full practice until 1886, and then on a limited scale through to 1897. He was the… Read More

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

Protected: John Pudney writes a prescription for… The Ideal City

John Pudney

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Tolerance

Tolerance

Tom Emerson

Too many people have talked about how profoundly the production of architecture has changed in the wake of the digital revolution. Far fewer have noted how architecture has resisted the seductive flourishes of digital production and maintained a dogged continuity with social and historical space. Bricks remain bricky even when… Read More

A Machine is a House for Making a Living

A Machine is a House for Making a Living

Drawing Architecture Studio

‘Mobility’ has long been a theme in architecture. After observing everyday life in Chinese cities, we became interested in exploring an understanding of mobility, which is not primarily defined by motion, but by the practices of pausing and occupying urban space. The discovery comes from the vehicles used by street… Read More

Melancholy Little Gardens

Melancholy Little Gardens

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Lionel Wallace, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Door in the Wall (1906), was haunted by the vision of an enchanted garden glimpsed in childhood. Having eluded the vigilant and authoritative care of his nursery governess, he found himself wandering aimlessly among the long grey West Kensington roads until he… Read More

Genius loci

Genius loci

Mehdi Zannad

This text was first published in French in d’a | d’architectures (no 322,11 December 2024) as a review of the exhibition Trompe-l’oeil, from 1520 to the present day, which was on show at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris from 17 October 2024 to 2 March 2025.  * It is difficult to distinguish between the… Read More

DMJ – A Storyboard for the Fun Palace

DMJ – A Storyboard for the Fun Palace

Ana Bonet Miró

Each community, with its own pride, wit and resourcefulness, could make a toy, a microcosm, a small city, a university-of-the-streets, a street theatre, a science playground, an adventure playground for the young kids – a place for time-wasting, gossip, new-arguing, learning, promenading, dancing, eating and drinking, handling tools, paint, machinery…… Read More

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Le Corbusier at Drawing Matter

Maristella Casciato and Nicholas Olsberg

Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887-1865) trained in the fine and decorative arts before undertaking travels and varied apprenticeships to develop his architectural skills, opening a studio and teaching practice in La Chaux in 1912, and moving to Paris in 1917 to work principally as a… Read More

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

N.B. These Drawings Were From Memory

Abel Sloane

After entering Smart’s Place, and climbing the steep staircase of treads (that become increasingly high and shallow until all the tension in my body was focused on my toes gripping and my weight not leaning back*), I arrived at the space of Drawing Matter where Rosie had indiscriminately laid out… Read More

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

Hans van der Laan’s Instruments of Thought: Proportion, Architecture, Analogy (2025)

C.M. Howell

Introduction A steady trickle of works on Dom Hans Van der Laan has appeared in the years since his passing in 1991. Most important among these, Richard Padovan has presented a compelling argument for the significance of Van der Laan’s theory of proportion through a series of texts, including Dom… Read More

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The drawings archive held by Mies at the time of his death was placed in the Museum of Modern Art, and his correspondence and papers at the Library of Congress. They constitute a comprehensive record of his works after the opening of his practice in the United States, especially for… Read More

River Arno

River Arno

Ivo Poças Martins

In Florence, the flooding of the River Arno on November 4, 1966 was of a magnitude not seen in almost 500 years of history. The city, built on this alluvial plain, was flooded and the river overflowed its banks, filling areas as far away as the Piazza del Duomo with… Read More

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Les Fantasmes de l’origine: A Reverse Archaeology of the Désert de Retz 

Francis Martinuzzi

Last year, Francis Martinuzzi contacted Drawing Matter after seeing a reproduction of one of his drawings on our website. The drawing was from a project from the submission for his architectural diploma with Jean Faloux under the tutelage of Antoine Grumbach at Unité Pédagogiuqe no. 6 (L’École nationale supérieure d’architecture… Read More

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

In the Archive: Abattoirs, Boucheries, and Slaughterhouses

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

Click on drawings to move and enlarge. As architectural typologies, abattoirs, boucheries, and slaughterhouses embody the civilising of animal slaughter; serving as concrete expressions of the culture of animal consumption. Over time, the slaughterhouse has evolved in both its structures and perceptions, from a small-scale, craft-based operation rooted in necessity,… Read More

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and His Times

Nicholas Ray

It’s the sign of a good book about an architect that you want to drop everything and go out to visit, or re-visit, their buildings. And a sure indication of a good book that reproduces many architectural drawings is that you want to be able to pore over the originals… Read More

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Name(r)s of the Animals and Drawers

Bahar Avanoğlu

‘Barely Traced, the true drawing escapes.’[1]  On a late night while reading Latife Tekin’s Zamansız (Timeless or Without Time)–a tale of love embedded in a lake, unfolded within the obscured semblances of a weasel and an eel–I found myself moving my lips, whispering: ‘Frii-iii-er-frii-ii-frii’. As I read the words printed on the paper, I… Read More

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the… Read More

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Josef Hoffmann: Placeholder Text

Editors

Designed to match the neoclassical grandeur of Peter Behrens’s Festival Hall, Josef Hoffmann formulates this monumental scheme for the Werkbund’s first exhibition in Cologne. Its facade is dominated by a propylaeum-like entrance, lined with fluted pillars. Above, stepped attics raise the gable fronts upward. The lettering is an appropriately Werkbund… Read More

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Ernö Goldfinger: Westminster Bank

Erin McKellar

Looking at Ernö Goldfinger’s drawing for Westminster Bank at Alexander Fleming House in London, the first thing that stands out is its grid-like form. The frame of the building and its windows form a grid, and a grid within a grid, respectively. A peek inside the carefully drawn ground-floor windows… 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

Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper

Buffington & Mies: Skyscrapers on Paper

Niall Hobhouse

The ‘skyscraper’ was conceived in Minnesota in 1871; its designer, LeRoy Buffington, described it in the patent he registered seventeen years later: ‘as a building having a continuous skeleton of metal, a covering of veneer, and a non-conducting packing between the skeleton and veneer.’ His innovation—which he struggled to defend… Read More