Tag: record
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra
20 May 2024
Architectural models and the oriental ideal of the Alhambra20 May 2024
The Alhambra architectural models reflect the circumstances in which they were created, during the last years of the Romantic movement, when artists and patrons were fascinated by the diffuse idea of the ‘Orient’, somewhat embodied by the Alhambra. This part-myth, part-real palace was the ultimate destination for Romantic travellers and… Read More
Remembering Architecture
18 October 2023
Remembering Architecture18 October 2023
This summer I exhibited a selection of photographs from the ongoing series Remembering Architecture in the Stephen Taylor designed Haybarn at Shatwell Farm. Kendra Matchett extended the invitation in the spring and over a few months we negotiated ideas of sequence and ways to respond to the material-forward exhibition space… Read More
Historic England Image Archive
23 January 2023
Historic England Image Archive23 January 2023
For the past two years, our Writing Prize has attracted a large number of thoughtful texts from participants all over the world. This year we partnered with the Architecture Foundation to sponsor one of their three writing prize categories. The Drawing Matter category, titled ‘Architecture and Representation’, invited entrants to… Read More
The ESB’s New Clothes
12 January 2023
The ESB’s New Clothes12 January 2023
In 1965 sixteen late-eighteenth-century houses on the east side of Fitzwilliam Street Lower, Dublin were demolished. They had served as headquarters of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and in their place was to be a new company HQ, a 1961 competition-winning scheme by the partnership of Sam Stephenson and Arthur… Read More
Owen Luder: Practice at Work
3 January 2023
Owen Luder: Practice at Work3 January 2023
The day-to-day workings of a practice such as OLP fall into two separate yet overlapping sectors: administration and job organisation. Unless these two are properly related and maintained, no amount of design talent, no amount of entrepreneurial vigour or personal charm will keep the practice alive and flourishing. For, despite… Read More
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller
11 July 2022
Elia Zenghelis: The Image as Emblem and Storyteller11 July 2022
We recently arranged for Elia Zenghelis to give a presentation under the title ‘The Image as Emblem and Storyteller’ via the Architecture Foundation’s YouTube channel. The talk summarises a thesis that Elia has been continuously developing throughout his career: from OMA’s polemical early work, via decades as one of the… Read More
Room at the Top?: Kate Macintosh, Denise Scott Brown and the kingmaker-critic
7 March 2022
Room at the Top?: Kate Macintosh, Denise Scott Brown and the kingmaker-critic7 March 2022
All creative disciplines rely on the mythologies of heroes: intellectual bigwigs who shape a profession’s academic and visual frameworks. A lengthy period of university study gives plenty of time for architecture students to ruminate on which white, male ‘guru’ to call their own — Corb, Aalto, Rossi, Scarpa? Drawings are… Read More
Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium
21 September 2021
Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium21 September 2021
In July 1958, one day before Faisal II was assassinated during the 14 July Revolution in Baghdad, the Iraqi Ministry of Development sent a telegram to Paris confirming Le Corbusier’s appointment to design the Olympic Stadium. Over the following months, while the programme and site were being clarified, his office… Read More
Survey: John Goldicutt, Temple of Vespasian
25 August 2021
Survey: John Goldicutt, Temple of Vespasian25 August 2021
Climbing and surveying the ruins of Rome was potentially dangerous, and there are reports of near-fatal accidents involving falls from height. George Wightwick, who would be employed by Soane on his return from Italy, advised students ‘not to risk [their] neck in measuring, for the thousandth time, a Roman ruin’.… Read More
Sketches from Algiers
2 August 2021
Sketches from Algiers2 August 2021
In October 1975 I returned to Cambridge to complete my architecture course. I had spent my year out in London with MacCormac and Jamieson, an exciting time as it was early days for this young practice and I was one of their very first assistants. In fact, I nearly didn’t… Read More
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!
14 July 2021
Leicester Engineering Building: Completed!14 July 2021
In this pendant piece to Leicester Engineering Building: Under Construction, follow James Gowan, once again, as the photographer of his own architecture. The text below is transcribed from an annotated typescript titled ‘Aspects of Humanism’, July 1989, archived at Drawing Matter. The text was published in Architecture Today as ‘Anatomy… Read More
Keeping a Notebook
24 June 2021
Keeping a Notebook24 June 2021
Looking into other people’s notebooks is to witness moments of creative exploration and growth. A graphic facility in others can provoke envy, but being given access into someone else’s mind and seeing where it wanders is always stimulating. As the examples published by Drawing Matter illustrate, architects’ notebooks harbour many… Read More
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989
2 June 2021
This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 19892 June 2021
In his voyage to Samos in the Summer of 1989 Aldo Rossi gathered a collection of fragments in accordance with a Palladian education. The image repeats itself, following what Johns had written in 1984: ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two:… Read More
Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt
19 April 2021
Sébastien Marot’s Taking The Country’s Side (2019): Review & Excerpt19 April 2021
Review On the occasion of the publication of this book, and the associated exhibition, which was a part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale of 2019, Sébastien Marot gave a talk that positioned his work about the Country’s Side in relation to Rem Koolhaas’s almost contemporaneous Guggenheim exhibition, Countryside. Marot was… Read More
Balzac architecte (1856)
9 April 2021
Balzac architecte (1856)9 April 2021
No drawing, nor stone in the ground, remains of the dream house near Paris which the young novelist was never able to complete. By the time Balzac resold the whole property in 1840, with debts of 100,000 francs, it had collapsed back into the landscape, together with the terraced plantations… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review
16 February 2021
Singing Songs of Piccadilly: Review16 February 2021
– Editors
Niall Hobhouse writes about The Buildings of Green Park by Andrew Jones. To purchase the book, click here. Green Park, a pair of anecdotes: 1. Queen Caroline – ‘What would it cost, Sir Robert, to close the Park to the public?’ Walpole – ‘May it please your Majesty, but Three Crowns –… Read More
OMA in Scheveningen
22 July 2020
OMA in Scheveningen22 July 2020
Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views
15 June 2020
Stirling at Stuttgart: Rear View / Up Views15 June 2020
Rear Views I joined the Stirling office in September 1976, working late hours through the length of four years until my return to Dublin towards the end of 1980. Straight out of college and into my first proper job, the critical years in my formation as an architect. I had… Read More
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures
18 May 2020
Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures18 May 2020
When he sat down to make the drawings that form this eight-page album of Roman buildings, Giovanni Battista Montano began by embossing lines onto the sheet with a stylus, straightedge and compass. Using natural black chalk, he then lightly sketched the principal parts and main particularities of the selected edifices.… Read More
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation
8 May 2020
O’Donnell + Tuomey in Conversation8 May 2020
– Sheila O'Donnell and John Tuomey
John Tuomey: Let me tell you the story of this drawing. We were at one of those despairing moments when we were putting together our book Space for Architecture and feeling that we had never achieved anything of any substance. We didn’t have a lot of work going at that particular moment,… Read More
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects
16 April 2020
The San Cataldo Ossuary in the Age of Hyper-Objects16 April 2020
I An abandoned house – a derelict phantom with no roof and no windows – reveals the twofold condition of architecture as image and as form. In San Cataldo, the image and form of death. As image: from afar, a metaphysical de Chirican presence, suspended between Adolf Loos’s project in… Read More
Streetscapes: Bath
7 October 2024
Streetscapes: Bath7 October 2024
– Ptolemy Dean
The following text is excerpted from Ptolemy Dean’s new book Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns, published by Lund Humphries. Find out more about the book and purchase a copy here. ‘Bath is, beyond any question, the loveliest of English cities’, wrote Walter Ison, whose 1948 work on the city continued:… Read More
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