Tag: sketch
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection
27.03.2026
Working (with) Drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection27.03.2026
– Rosie Ellison-Balaam and Maria Mitsoula
The following text was first published in Stoà 14 – SCUOLE, SYLLABUS / SCHOOLS, BRIEF (Autumn 2025). * Drawing Matter and its Collection The Drawing Matter Collection, carefully assembled by collector, curator, and critic Niall Hobhouse over thirty years, comprises around 20,000 objects—including architectural drawings, models, photographs, and sketchbooks, among others—from around the… Read More
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio
26.03.2026
Collection Guide: Futurism, Rationalism, and Stile Littorio26.03.2026
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: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture
24.03.2026
Protected: Scaletales: Dr Franz Gibarian’s Lecture24.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Shadows in the work of Canaletto
23.03.2026
Shadows in the work of Canaletto23.03.2026
Canaletto used a camera obscura to trace the architecture of Venice on site.[1] He used the camera sketches in turn to produce finished drawings and paintings. Fig.1 reproduces two pages from Canaletto’s sketchbook, his quaderno, now in the Accademia Galleries in Venice. They show the Campo and Church of SS Giovanni… Read More
Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing
18.03.2026
Protected: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Cloud Board and the Architectural Drawing18.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Protected: Time Theft
17.03.2026
Protected: Time Theft17.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Baroqsysms
16.03.2026
Baroqsysms16.03.2026
Are architects wired to interpret reality flattened into two dimensions, with the third hovering somewhere nearby like an amputated ghost limb? Can short-form video animations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, scratch that phantom itch between two and three dimensions that we, survivors of this mental re-ordering, suffer from? I started thinking about… Read More
Protected: Drawing Superpositions
12.03.2026
Protected: Drawing Superpositions12.03.2026
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
DMJ – Death Masks
06.03.2026
DMJ – Death Masks06.03.2026
This series of drawings is part of a larger project titled Tracking Blood Meridian, which explores the work of the American writer Cormac McCarthy. The sketchbook pages are developed as studies for landscape-like death masks that relate to members of the nineteenth-century Glanton gang, on whose exploits McCarthy’s 1985 novel… Read More
Protected: Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio
03.03.2026
Protected: Desire and Pain: John Hejduk’s Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio03.03.2026
– Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Levers Long Enough to Move the World
03.03.2026
Levers Long Enough to Move the World03.03.2026
‘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
02.03.2026
New Views on Vanbrugh and his Drawings02.03.2026
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
27.02.2026
The Brick Pencil: Analogue Technology in a Digital Age27.02.2026
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
Drawing of a Cause
25.02.2026
Drawing of a Cause25.02.2026
The following text is based on an excerpt from Lost Causes: Possibilidade e Política em Concursos de Habitação (Porto: Circo de Ideias, 2025), edited by João Manuel Miranda and Tiago Antero. The book presents the results of ‘Lost Causes’, a research project that aims to promote critical reflection on unbuilt… Read More
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York
09.02.2026
Saul Steinberg: Bucharest, Milan, New York09.02.2026
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
Arrows
19.01.2026
Arrows19.01.2026
The small drawing that adorns the title page of F. R. S. Yorke’s 1937 study, The Modern House in England, is typical for its time. It shows an aerial perspective, made in thin black lines, of a conventional modern house with all its attributes. Cubic in shape, the house is… Read More
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop
15.01.2026
Drawing Research Platform, London, 2025, ENAC Summer Workshop15.01.2026
– Raffael Baur, Patricia Guaita and Matthew Wells
For a fourth year, Drawing Matter hosted students from ENAC EPFL for a week-long workshop on survey drawings—this time not in a Somerset farmyard, but in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 400 yards east of the archive. The workshop was organised by Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur in collaboration with Drawing Matter,… Read More
Summer Evenings on Sukhna Dam
08.01.2026
Summer Evenings on Sukhna Dam08.01.2026
Poornmashi. The bright full-moon nights of the year were always opportunities for us to try to convince our parents to organise a picnic at the Lake. Chandigarh is a long way from the ocean, way inland, surrounded by the vast Indo-Gangetic plains. And although the mighty Himalayas are right at… Read More
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid
15.12.2025
Collection Guide: Zaha Hadid15.12.2025
– 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
This is Tomorrow
02.12.2025
This is Tomorrow 02.12.2025
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
Drawing as Method and Process
28.11.2025
Drawing as Method and Process28.11.2025
Modus is a preparatory school for studies in architecture, art, and design, as well as a sustained investigation into the potentialities of drawing. Here, drawing is used to pose questions, uncover spatial and formal possibilities, and articulate new architectural statements. The school is founded on the belief that while architecture… Read More
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)
24.11.2025
Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important (Exhibition + Talk)24.11.2025
– Editors
On Friday 7 November, Drawing Matter welcomed architects Tony Fretton and Benjamin Machin to the archive for a conversation to open the exhibition ‘Tony Fretton: Everything I Saw Became Important’. Anchored by seven ‘artefacts’ now in the Drawing Matter Collection, the conversation explores the roles of drawings, photography, and sketchbooks… Read More
Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks (Video)
20.11.2025
Notes on Louis-Hippolyte Lebas’ Travel Sketchbooks (Video) 20.11.2025
The sketchbook is your loyal private companion, your eyewitness and accomplice on voyeuristic escapes and inquisitive journeys. It is a brain in your hand, mirroring even subconscious registrations, only discovered afterwards, as you flick through the pages, absent-mindedly. You remember—much has already entered you, through the hand. I cry when… Read More
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural
30.03.2026
Louis Kahn: Sketch for a Mural30.03.2026
– Matt Page
Drawing Matter holds a large number of drawings, prints and other materials relating to a project for an office building in Kansas City designed by Louis Kahn. The project was one of the last that the architect worked on before his death in 1974, and many of the drawings carry… Read More
sketch travel DMC tracing shadows