Tag: presentation

Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

– Editors

Alberto Ponis was born in the small port suburb of Nervi in Genoa, in 1933. He was the son of Mario A. Ponis, who owned a textile production company called MITA, which introduced him early on to many Italian artists and designers of the 20th century. The company had worked… Read More

Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery

Protected: Snapshots of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery

– Luis Callejas and Julia Spackman

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

An Interview with David Connor

An Interview with David Connor

– Gianni Botsford and David Connor

* Gianni Botsford (GB): What I said that I could talk to you about is where it all started for you, how you learned to draw,  where your drawing method came from, and how it developed over time. David Connor (DC): I did start to draw when I was 4 or 5, which would… Read More

The Indeterminate Building: Grimshaw’s ‘Action Factory’ for Herman Miller

The Indeterminate Building: Grimshaw’s ‘Action Factory’ for Herman Miller

– Matt Page

In 1975, following a closed competition during which Norman Foster and James Stirling were also approached, the Farrell/Grimshaw Partnership were invited to design a new factory for the American furniture company Herman Miller. Five years earlier, the company had set up a salesroom and workshop in Bath in the former… Read More

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