Tag: religion

Trees Move In

Trees Move In

Sylvia Lavin

The following text is the second of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More

Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Startha Éagsula: Grafton Architects on Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara

This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. We… Read More

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette

Stan Allen and José Oubrerie

‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More

The wobbly line: Asplund, Johansson and the influence of Tessenow in Sweden 1915–1925

The wobbly line: Asplund, Johansson and the influence of Tessenow in Sweden 1915–1925

Jan Rydén

There is a drawing in a 1923 issue of the Swedish trade journal Byggmästaren (The Master-Builder). It is part of a presentation of a new three-storey house by the architect Cyrillus Johansson. To illustrate his text the architect has included photos and a drawing of the front elevation and a plan of… Read More

Working with Asplund

Working with Asplund

Herbert Korn

Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More

Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures

Ink on his Hands: Montano’s Visceral Roman Architectures

Dijana O. Apostolski

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

Space

Space

Charles Moore

Space in architecture is a special category of free space, phenomenally created by the architect when he gives a part of free space shape and scale. Its first two dimensions – width and breadth – are responsive mainly to functional imperatives in the narrow sense, but the manipulation of its… Read More

Summerson: The Little House

Summerson: The Little House

John Summerson

– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.

Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’

Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’

Robin Evans

– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.

A Dose of Dosio

A Dose of Dosio

Laura Harty

Tightening the belt, lean-manufacturing, ‘trimming the fat’. These are guiding principles of instrumentalised, technocratic systems termed by French sociologists as dégraissé – translated literally ‘degreased’ or ‘defatted’, but also figuratively understood as streamlined, purified and uncontaminated. [1] Instinctively, however, we know that flavour resides in fat. Thoughts of feasting, and midwinter delicacies, wallow… Read More

Behind the Lines 12

Behind the Lines 12

Philippa Lewis

1870Colonel James Clifton-Brown, newly established at Holmbush, his Regency country house in Colgate, West Sussex, has political ambitions – namely, the parliamentary seat for Horsham. He observes that the villagers have only a small cramped chapel in which to fulfil their ambitions to be good Christians. The chapel is not… Read More

Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan

Dom Hans van der Laan: Drawing the Scottish Tartan

Caroline Voet

This essay is published to celebrate the release of Dom Hans van der Laan, A House for the Mind: A design Manual on Roosenberg Abbey, by Caroline Voet. Buy the book. For more info on the design methodology and the work of Dom Hans van der Laan, see the educational website and… Read More