Tag: sketch
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
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
Comins x Shatwell Tea House
25.08.2023
Comins x Shatwell Tea House25.08.2023
– Various
Similar to the way the soil, climate, cultivar, and—of course—the tea maker come together to craft distinct and flavourful teas, numerous helping hands played an important role in the journey that culminated in the process and construction of the Comins x Shatwell Tea House. The most common question visitors have… Read More
Quinta da Malagueira
11.08.2023
Quinta da Malagueira11.08.2023
In this short text Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on Quinta da Malagueira housing project in what he sees as a potential convergence between formal principals and political intentions. Quinta da Malagueira is perhaps the last great ‘social housing project’. That is, it is the last great architectural contribution to the… Read More
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital
11.07.2023
Learning From Machine Learning, on designer trees and architectural historiographies of the digital11.07.2023
What does it mean for scholars to collaborate with contemporary knowledge machines? In this article, Sylvia Lavin reflects on the failures, successes, and potentialities of a machine learning tool designed to identify trees in architectural drawings. This project, which she initiated in 2022, was undertaken by Princeton University and the… Read More
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape
29.06.2023
John Hejduk’s Bye House: An Object in the Landscape29.06.2023
– Stan Allen and Marina Correia
‘Life has to do with walls; we are continuously going in and out back and forth and through them; a wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the thing we’re always transgressing, and that is why I see it as the present, the most surface condition.’ — John Hejduk[1] The series… Read More
Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream
21.06.2023
Álvaro Siza: A Vertical Dream21.06.2023
– António Choupina and Álvaro Siza
In this short video, António Choupina and Álvaro Siza discuss a sketch for an imaginary skyscraper from Caderno 32 (1979), now in the Drawing Matter Collection. Siza describes his interest in Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Mile-High Illinois’ or ‘Sky City’ tower (1957), and his work for Rogério de Azevedo on the… Read More
Casa Ugalde Sketch
19.06.2023
Casa Ugalde Sketch19.06.2023
– Laura Bonell and Daniel Lopez-Doriga
As José Antonio Coderch told it, Mr. Ugalde climbed on the hill, sat in the shadow of a carob tree and looked around him. He then hired Coderch and his partner Manuel Valls with the unique proposal of building a house in the outskirts of Barcelona that could preserve the… Read More
On Authority
26.05.2023
On Authority26.05.2023
Following our recent series with fala we decided to approach some other practices who have themselves developed their design process through particular drawing ‘types’, challenging our expectation of the usage and forms traditionally associated with drawing in an architecture studio. We are very grateful to fala for introducing us to Nuno Melo Sousa… Read More
Sverre Fehn and the Territorial Eye
18.05.2023
Sverre Fehn and the Territorial Eye18.05.2023
This text is adapted from an abstract to Erika Brandl’s short paper which she presented last year at the ‘Nordic Nature: Art, Ecology, Landscape’ conference in Bergen. Architectural histories of Norway have been inexorably tied to landscape and localism, framed as the romantic wedlock of nature and the built form.… Read More
MJ Long’s Doll House
31.03.2023
MJ Long’s Doll House31.03.2023
In 2018, I met the architect MJ Long at her home. Located in a building designed and constructed in the 1930s by Thomas Tait, it doubled as Long’s studio. It was formerly the home and studio of the sculptor Sir William Dick Reid; MJ Long and her husband Sandy (Colin… Read More
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect
27.03.2023
Álvaro Siza — An ‘Amoral’ Architect27.03.2023
The fact that Álvaro Siza did not write about his work or about architecture is a conscious gesture, which goes beyond the mere neutrality of city walls. What is important in Siza is not the end result or the work, hence his lack of comment. His manner, his alibis, his… Read More
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work
03.02.2023
W. R. Lethaby: Philip Webb and His Work03.02.2023
This is the fifth and final text in this series, where Hugh Strange visits key texts throughout W. R. Lethaby’s life. Philip Webb was William Lethaby’s great hero; he considered his life and work the model for an architect. Webb was a generation older than Lethaby, and the two men most… Read More
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients
26.10.2022
Drawing Conversations: Letters to Clients26.10.2022
In October 1925 Le Corbusier wrote to his client Madame Meyer a remarkable letter about his proposal with Pierre Jeanneret for her villa. It combined drawings with a highly scripted text that carefully guided her through each space, from the entrance to the roof garden. Like the pioneers of early… Read More
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing
21.10.2022
How Big is Big – Does Scale Matter? A Reflection on Scale in Architecture and Drawing21.10.2022
– Federica Goffi and Devon Moar
The bee drawing(s) by Devon Moar illustrate that changes in scale imply a passage of time. One drawing here becomes many drawings, each marking a different moment of discovery unfolding a process. One could say that when it comes to architectural media, there are two types of scales dealing with… Read More
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture
23.09.2022
Robert Maxwell: The Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture23.09.2022
– Editors
These three sketches are from a sketchbook that Robert Maxwell used while studying at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1944. They are reproduced here to mark the publication of Robert Maxwell: the Letter, the Lost Sketchbook and the Lecture, edited by Celia Scott, which is now available through Drawing… Read More
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24.06.2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24.06.2022
For an artist, ‘getting down to work’ is an instinct carried out spontaneously. […] The first outpouring in the pages of the sketchbook, when thought turns into action, at the meeting point between a project and a site, is so strong sometimes, so commanding, that one has the feeling that… Read More
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook
22.06.2022
Workshop: On Siza’s March ’77 Sketchbook22.06.2022
This audio recording documents a workshop on Álvaro Siza’s Malagueira sketchbook delivered by Manuel Montenegro to Masters students from the School of Engineering and Architecture, Fribourg, and their tutors Patricia Guaita and Raffael Baur. The sketchbook is a record of Siza’s thoughts and responses over three days in 1977, on… 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
– Bahar Avanoğlu
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
sketch projection (axonometric isometric) Teaching (project) DMC