Tag: sketch
The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition
03.06.2024
The GSD Sketching Group and the Call for Sketchbooks Exhibition03.06.2024
The GSD Sketching Group brings together the Harvard Graduate School of Design community to explore and sketch their surroundings. This student group was founded in February 2022 by Olivia Champ Tremml and myself, with the goal of dignifying hand drawing within the design professions and to strengthen its relevance in… Read More
Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein
29.05.2024
Begin again. Fail Better: Pichler and Hollein29.05.2024
This text by Matt Page will be included in the exhibition catalogue for Begin again. Fail Better: Preliminary drawings in architecture (and art). The exhibition opens on the 31st May 2024 at the Kunstmuseum Olten, and includes nearly 100 drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection. More information about the exhibition… Read More
Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter
27.05.2024
Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter27.05.2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
French architect Louis-Hippolyte Lebas (1782–1867) trained with Percier and Fontaine, whose assistant he remained for some years; working in Paris, both independently and in collaboration with Éloi Labarre and others from the mid 1820s; professor of history of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1840; and leader of an… Read More
Notes from Rome
23.05.2024
Notes from Rome23.05.2024
– Anna Kostreva and Diane Lewis
The following text first appeared in Conceiving the Plan: Nuance and Intimacy in Civic Space, ed. by Yael Hameiri Sainsaux (Milano: Skira editore, 2022), 192-195. Edited and transcribed by Anna Kostreva. In 1977, Diane Lewis had just graduated from The Cooper Union and was honored with a fellowship at the… Read More
Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs
22.05.2024
Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs22.05.2024
‘Geometric, rigorously drawn, and yet always signed somewhere with an asymmetrical fold or knot.’[1] While this could be a concise description of Peter Wilson’s work, it is in fact Roland Barthes writing in his book Empire of Signs (1970) about what he described as the Japanese ‘ecstasy of the package’.[2] Barthes was struck by… Read More
John Hejduk’s Farm Library
15.05.2024
John Hejduk’s Farm Library15.05.2024
– Mehrshad Atashi and Lida Badafareh
Farm Library is one among the sixty-eight entities that John Hejduk designed for the Lancaster/Hanover Masque. It is a primitive round object, with a spiral staircase positioned in its centre, running from the ground to the top. The bookshelves of the library are aligned with the boundary of the building, maintaining a distance… Read More
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter
23.04.2024
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter23.04.2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19.04.2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19.04.2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim
17.04.2024
Mies van der Rohe: Clarity as the Aim17.04.2024
Mies’s work is an exemplary embodiment of the idea of architectural abstraction. His buildings are free of all the ‘figurative’ ingredients that characterise traditional architecture. They are made up of materials or constructive elements given cohesion and structure by a series of visual devices. But, although his language is so… Read More
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings
12.04.2024
Helsinki City Theatre: Timo Penttilä on the real purpose of drawings12.04.2024
On his retirement in 1998 as professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Finnish architect Timo Penttilä returned to Finland, where he soon made the decision to close his architectural practice. In this process he ordered his staff to destroy the entire office archive of drawings… Read More
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.
29.02.2024
Unveiling the Enigma: Jan Henriksson’s Örebro Riksbank, 1987.29.02.2024
– Felicia Liang and William Wikström
Jan Henriksson playfully crafted an evocative scenography for the financial world of the 1980s, deviating from the pursuit of uniformity with various forms that break free as autonomous figures within a larger context. Two of Henriksson’s drawings for the Central Bank, Örebro Riksbank exemplify his unique position in 20th-century Swedish… Read More
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens
15.02.2024
Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Gustav III of Sweden), Designing Gardens15.02.2024
In the following extract, from his book Cambridge College Gardens, Tim Richardson describes the incident that made philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein sketch out his ideas for an alternative garden design at Trinity College in Cambridge, alongside a letter Wittgenstein wrote to the College Garden Committee objecting to the plans for their… Read More
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras
19.01.2024
DMJ – Pencils, Computers, Cameras19.01.2024
Is distance the raw material of architecture? The early work of Itsuko Hasegawa seems to address this question. In her own words, these projects allowed human beings and architecture to ‘come close and react to each other’, by setting up ‘long distances’. She developed an array of representation techniques through… Read More
Alberto Ponis, The London Years
14.12.2023
Alberto Ponis, The London Years14.12.2023
I am leafing through a neat hundred-page sketchbook with notes, the text enlivened with pencil, charcoal, and pen sketches with varied annotations, including asterisks and underlining in colour crayon, brought into order with careful lists and occasional full pages on practical matters such as delivering a lecture or taking architectural… Read More
DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura
13.12.2023
DMJ – Canaletto’s Venetian Sketches and the Camera Obscura13.12.2023
Antonio Canaletto used a camera obscura to make careful sketches of the buildings of Venice. The Gallerie dell’ Accademia has a quaderno, a notebook containing 140 pages of these sketches, which provided the raw material for paintings made in the 1730s, as well as finished drawings that Canaletto offered for sale.… Read More
On Drawing
30.11.2023
On Drawing30.11.2023
A drawing for me is a model that oscillates between the idea and the physical, or built, reality of architecture. It is not a step toward this reality but an autonomous act to anticipate the concreteness of the ideal. An architectural drawing can never be rendered but must surrender to… Read More
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial
20.11.2023
The ‘indispensable ingredients of sublimity’: Smirke and Papworth’s Designs for the Wellington Testimonial20.11.2023
In 2001, the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) acquired at auction an item described in the catalogue as ‘Architectural Drawing, possibly by Robert Smirke, of Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park’. The unsigned, undated drawing is a perspective view of an obelisk, the base of which is a four-faced distyle Doric temple. This… Read More
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines
14.11.2023
Heinz Isler: Natural Hills on Different Edge Lines14.11.2023
I first encountered Heinz Isler’s thin reinforced concrete shells when I saw his presentation ‘Third Decade of Structural Shells’ at the thirtieth anniversary symposium of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), in Madrid, in September 1989. This was the first time I saw his inspirational drawing ‘Natural Hills on… Read More
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands
03.11.2023
Connor Street: Made by Many Hands03.11.2023
The following text is the first in a series by architect Kieran Hawkins, Director of Cairn, tracing the design and construction of an extension to a Victorian House in East London, recounting the everyday realities of the project and, in the green text, the broader environmental issues incumbent on architects to address. The texts have been developed… Read More
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing
13.10.2023
Fragmentary Notes on Unclaiming the Life of a Drawing13.10.2023
The following notes reflect on a first year teaching studio led by Bahar Avanoğlu at Istanbul Bilgi University. The studio took Niall McLaughlin’s Alternative Histories model, an interpretation of a sketch by Basil Spence for extending the Houses of Parliament in London, as a starting point to continue a chain… Read More
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album
06.10.2023
Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album06.10.2023
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 1
20.06.2024
Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in Conversation – Part 120.06.2024
– Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson
This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversation held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: What led you to architecture to begin with, Peter? You began studying… Read More
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