Tag: presentation

The ‘Typewriter’ Drawing

The ‘Typewriter’ Drawing

Valeriia Chemerisova

The ‘Typewriter’ drawing is made on brown paper mounted on a black backing, its surface carrying both the mechanical impressions of a typewriter and the analogue traces of a black pen layered above them. But unlike later typewriter drawings, which use typed characters as grids, codes, or proto-digital marks, this… Read More

Protected: Mapping Water

Protected: Mapping Water

Anna Biza

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries

Protected: The Creative Potential of Archival Boundaries

John Walter

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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

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

Frances Sands

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Protected: Carlos Bedoya, PRODUCTORA: Thinking through Drawing

Stan Allen

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Principle of ‘Reach’

The Principle of ‘Reach’

Anna Myjak-Pycia

In the home economics theory of domestic space, a necessary and pivotal condition allowing the homemaker to work out and practice more ‘efficient’ routines, and thereby decrease her domestic drudgery, was the design of home interior. This included the arrangement of the objects of daily use. Conceptualising the space as… Read More

The Open Hand Reloaded

The Open Hand Reloaded

Maristella Casciato

* Maristella Casciato (architect, architectural historian, and educator) is senior curator, head of architectural collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

Protected: Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Protected: Collection Guide: Cedric Price

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Protected: Owen Luder: Sunderland Stadium

Protected: Owen Luder: Sunderland Stadium

Owen Hopkins

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The House Stands Still While Life Moves

The House Stands Still While Life Moves

Alessandro Mendini

The house has a floor sticky like honey; our feet cling to it and we cannot get away from it. The house is a rucksack so huge and full on our shoulders that every movement becomes impossible. The house is an unconditional refuge for those who fear all the mishaps… Read More

On Cedric Price

On Cedric Price

Andrea Branzi

Cedric Price’s thinking and work have had a very particular influence on my work, in the sense that some fundamental choices I have made as an architect have been deeply influenced by his philosophy. In this sense, it seems to me that Cedric Price was one of the few architects… Read More

Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio

Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio

Rosie Ellison-Balaam

The Drawing Matter collection holds around 70 objects that speak to Italy’s architectural evolution in the early twentieth century. It should be noted that this period was characterised by tremendous stylistic diversity, with movements and groups—often unhappily—coexisting and shifting, ultimately culminating in the dominance of the Stile Littorio.  At the… Read More

Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House

Protected: James Gowan’s Schreiber House

Vera Okodugha

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House

The Unperformed: Eisenstein’s Set Design for Heartbreak House

Max Livesey

The sole drawing by Sergei Eisenstein in the Drawing Matter archive is a set design for a production of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House (1919) from 1922. It is a rare, interdisciplinary confluence of a socialist Irish playwright (Shaw), a Russian filmmaker and theorist (Eisenstein), and a radical theatre maker… Read More

Levers Long Enough to Move the World

Levers Long Enough to Move the World

Andrew Holder

‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’ — Archimedes Levers Long Enough to Move the World is an exhibition of architectural sketches curated by Andrew Holder at the Pratt School of Architecture, featuring the work of 62 contemporary… Read More

New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings

New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings

Charles Saumarez Smith

This text is published to mark the opening of John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture at Sir John Soane’s Museum (4 March–28 June 2026), co-curated by Charles Saumarez Smith and Roz Barr. More information about the exhibition can be found here. In the summer of 1982, when I was at… Read More

The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age

The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age

Daniel Rosenberg

Part 1: The Brick Pencil In a colour photograph with the rich saturation of Kodachrome, against an aquamarine background, a manicured hand grips an upright brick. Taped to the brick, tip down, is a pencil. The weight of the brick is palpable. Someone is working hard to write with this… Read More

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Het woonpalazzo – The Residential Palazzo

Nicholas Ray

Open any book by a Dutch architect and you are bound to come across H. P. Berlage—the forefather from whom sprang everything, albeit indirectly, from the Amsterdam School to Der Stijl and who is revered for his contribution at all scales from the details of his buildings to his town… Read More

Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York

Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York

Stefan Davidovici

Steinberg is for me, first of all, the New Yorker magazine—one of the most intelligent and open American publications, with a very distinct graphic style that includes a generous use of drawings and cartoons, born and fed by the amazingly rich cultural landscape of New York City. I see New York… Read More

Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid

Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid

Editors

Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. After studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon, from 1968 to 1971, she moved to London in 1972, where she studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA). It was here that her work began to reference the Russian avant-garde,… Read More

Protected: The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

Protected: The Olympic Stadium Project: Le Corbusier & Baghdad

Editors

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

The Lovell Health House: Richard Neutra’s Revolution in Building 

Nicholas Olsberg

‘Paris, 1927. I was in Lurçat’s studio on the rue Bonaparte looking for the first time at reproductions of the ‘Health House’ of Neutra. We young followers of the new architecture were both admiring and astounded by this signal of a revolution in building.’   Willy Boesiger, introducing Richard Neutra. Buildings and Projects (Zurich:… Read More

This is Tomorrow 

This is Tomorrow 

Tess McCann

The following text is excerpted from the catalogue of the exhibition Theo Crosby: One Hundred Lives, which is on view at Osh Gallery London until the 11th December 2025. Curated by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and researcher Tess McCann, the exhibition focuses on the life and work of Theo Crosby, one of the founding… Read More

Collection Guide: The Viennese School

Collection Guide: The Viennese School

Iain Boyd Whyte

Drawing Matter’s collection of Viennese drawings from the 19th and early 20th century includes works by Franz Jakob Kreuter, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Otto Schönthal, Emil Hoppe, and Friedrich Ohmann, among others. It was a time of great technological advance, social upheaval, cultural revolt, and changing attitudes to design.  Considered as a group, the… Read More