Tag: sketch
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt
2 September 2021
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt2 September 2021
Notations is a collection of pamphlets in a box. Curating the content in this manner has allowed the editors to present the publication as a physical representation of their thesis that the notebook is a device for the cultivation of individual worlds. The plurality is important. The pamphlets are collected… Read More
36 Elevations
12 July 2021
36 Elevations12 July 2021
I began this series of drawings with something else in mind. The first picture was to be drawn freehand, but I took a wrong turn straight away by setting up a structure using a set-square around which the composition would be based. I realised that the structure was already a… Read More
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential
28 June 2021
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential28 June 2021
Below is a sketch of a traditional South Korean Pojagi (a handcrafted patchwork tapestry) drawn by Florian Beigel. Described as ‘beautifully unsure’, it shows the importance of the sketch in translating between a reference and the key concept of the Pojagi House, designed by Beigel and the Architectural Research Unit… 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
Architectural Drawing (1983)
22 June 2021
Architectural Drawing (1983)22 June 2021
This essay was first published in the catalogue for Drawings by Architects (25 February – 3 April 1983), held at the ICA in London. A period piece, for sure, the text sits at the cusp of changing attitudes to the display and value attributed to architect’s drawings. In recent years… Read More
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh
15 June 2021
Notes on Twelve drawings for the Governor’s Palace at Chandigarh15 June 2021
Drawing Matter was introduced to José Oubrerie by Stan Allen after publishing his text Just Begin in July 2020. Oubrerie worked for Le Corbusier on the Brazilian Pavillion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris in 1958 and in the Atelier at 35 Rue de Sèvres from 1959 to 1965. The… 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
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City
12 May 2021
Hans Hollein’s Immunological City12 May 2021
Hans Hollein’s city structures look awry to someone familiar with his retail work. In the time that these drawings were made, Hollein completed his UC Berkeley degree, travelled across the USA, and did an exhibition with Walter Pichler in Austria. His most influential visit was to the Native American pueblos.… Read More
Hans Hollein: From a Distance
7 April 2021
Hans Hollein: From a Distance7 April 2021
On a page of Hans Hollein’s sketchbook, a cluster of adobe buildings climb slowly and modestly above the horizon, seeming to rise out of the earth. The sketch, produced in 1960 during the Austrian architect’s exploration of the western United States, feels unorthodox for Hollein, whose proclivity for radical, anti-Functionalist… Read More
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield
31 March 2021
Remembering a House in an Indiana Cornfield31 March 2021
Dear Nicholas, It was wonderful to connect to your seminar and with you. We must catch up soon. I learned a lot from your presentation. And it brought back a flood of memories. Just now I quickly sketched the open plan house my father designed and had built in 1946,… Read More
Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden
30 March 2021
Casino Royale: Stynen’s unrealised sculpture garden30 March 2021
The city council of the seaside town Oostende organised a competition for its new casino-kursaal in 1945, and a design by Antwerp architect Léon Stynen was chosen as the winner the following year. Stynen was a prominent name by that time, having previously designed casinos for Knokke, Chaudfontaine, and Blankenberge.… Read More
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing
22 March 2021
Marie-José Van Hee: Seeing not Showing22 March 2021
‘House’ by Marie-José Van Hee is drawn on a sheet of trace, the edge of which is visible at the top, offset from the plain white ground for photographing or scanning. It is a freehand drawing that uses black graphite for lines, to hatch, shade, and achieve gradations of roughly rendered… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch
16 March 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 8: Patrick Lynch16 March 2021
This is the eighth in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode we share Instagram posts by Patrick Lynch in which he describes his experience… Read More
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things
8 March 2021
Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things8 March 2021
The following text was first published in The Library: Glasgow School of Art (2014), edited by Mark Baines, John Barr and Christopher Platt. The text describes Paul Clarke’s process of surveying Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s library at the Glasgow School of Art, which he undertook in 1993. When the library was… Read More
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS
25 February 2021
Pan Scroll Zoom 7: MOS25 February 2021
– Fabrizio Gallanti, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample
This is the seventh in a series of texts edited by Fabrizio Gallanti on the challenges in the new world of online architectural teaching and, particularly, on the changing role of drawings in presentations and reviews. In this episode Fabrizio interviews Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of the New York-based… Read More
Re-presenting the Rococo
24 February 2021
Re-presenting the Rococo24 February 2021
In October 2017, I travelled to the outskirts of Munich to spend three days in the company of Johann Michael Fischer’s church of St Michael at Berg am Laim with the purpose of presenting it in drawings and photographs. The trip was sponsored by the Drawing Matter Trust and was intended to act as… Read More
Take One: Architects on Drawing
23 February 2021
Take One: Architects on Drawing23 February 2021
– Editors
Take One is a collaboration between Drawing Matter and the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. Each episode pairs a drawing or visual element with a short audio extract, showing the image alongside the voice of its creator or an informed commentator. The audio extracts are taken from life… Read More
Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism
19 February 2021
Walter Pichler: Mystery and Mysticism19 February 2021
Walter Pichler’s sketches for the utopian city projects he developed with Hans Hollein in the early 1960s appear like arrangements of magnetised iron filings, blowing about the page to reveal mysterious momentary structures. Though they would later inform hardened isometric drawings, these forms are full of plasticity and, in this… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17 February 2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17 February 2021
Superstudio’s Campo di Mais is a hybrid of the group’s concepts and a treasure trove of unintended (and unforeseeable) references. As such, it is a quite perfect Superstudio collage – another mirror image inviting the observer to reflect their own coordinates of understanding the world through the group’s ambiguous visual… Read More
The Problem with Rainbows
12 February 2021
The Problem with Rainbows12 February 2021
Resta sempre insoluto il problema dell’arcobalenoPare que ce ne sia uno dopo la pioggiaE che dall’alto con l’aereoSi veda tutto tornaMa questo metterebbe in crisi tutto quelliChe cercano la pentola d’oro Alle fine dell’arcobaleno C’e sempre un arcobalenoAl di sopra di ogni questione sulla quantitàE qualità dei suoi coloriDopo la pioggiaMa non dopo ogni pioggia… Read More
The Architect and the Matador
8 February 2021
The Architect and the Matador8 February 2021
On one sheet, a matador;on the other, a design,with measurements for a cathedral pier. What unites these drawingsis provenance:both, apparently, executedby the architectEugène Viollet-le-Ducin meetings. As Viollet-le-Duc’s mind wanderedfrom doodle to design,my attention,beholding the drawings,is drawn between the two sheets; drawn, by the insistently connective impulseof looking,into associations. Between architect… Read More
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery
5 February 2021
On Tony Fretton and the Lisson Gallery5 February 2021
A conversation with Nicholas Logsdail, standing in the farmyard at Shatwell, on the day he came with Freeny Yanni her sons Yanis and Cassius Hammick, to look at Tony Fretton’s sketchbooks for the Lisson Gallery. By way of response, Tony gives us his account of the genesis of the commission.… Read More
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows
3 February 2021
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows3 February 2021
The pale white touch The most exquisite glow and depth of shadows An immutable mystery in the crossbeam of tranquillity simply vanished when the sunlight flooded the atmosphere Of this small corner Where we as children would feel an inexpressible chill While waiting so quiet and pliant to the touch… Read More
Sketches from Algiers
2 August 2021
Sketches from Algiers2 August 2021
– Adam Voelcker
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
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