Tag: sketch
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
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England
18.05.2022
William Dickinson’s Pocketbook: Rethinking Drawing & practice in Early C18th England18.05.2022
During the upheavals of the Civil War, Westminster Abbey had functioned as the church of the state for the Commonwealth. Upon the Restoration of Charles II, the Abbey resumed its historic role as the coronation church for English monarchs. [1] Parliament voted towards restoring the fabric, reinstituting its monarchical function… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing
22.04.2022
Syon House and the Afterlife of Architectural Drawing22.04.2022
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [1] I knew very little about the eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam prior to June 2014. When challenged to respond to his drawings of the Long Gallery at Syon House, my impulse was to visit and draw my way through… Read More
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19.04.2022
‘For the Curiosity of the Article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19.04.2022
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
What’s a Bludder Sketch?
28.02.2022
What’s a Bludder Sketch?28.02.2022
As a timid foreigner in the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, shuffling through hundreds of important-looking drawings, I stumbled across a funny little sketch in whose lines I found some humanity. It was made by Bengt Lindroos in 1981 and is an imagined view of his office with the… Read More
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21.02.2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21.02.2022
– Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn
10.02.2022
Growth or Composition? Colin Rowe to Louis Kahn10.02.2022
Extracted, with permission, from Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing edited by Michael Merrill, published by Lars Müller Publishers © 2021. Click here to read a review of this book by Stan Allen. An auspicious meeting: At the end of 1955, a thirty-five-year-old academic named Colin Rowe visited the office… Read More
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi
19.01.2022
Álvaro Siza: The Adoration of the Magi19.01.2022
Our story opens at the close of the Christmas season. It quite literally starts with an Epiphany, both chronologically and figuratively, a glimpse of Three Kings prompted by Niall Hobhouse’s holiday greetings. His somewhat precarious nativity scene, charmingly set upon Álvaro Siza’s yellow columns, reminded me of Sandro Botticelli’s Adoration… Read More
Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment
06.01.2022
Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment06.01.2022
The following is an excerpt from Fabio Colonnese’s essay, ‘Between the Layers: Transparent Paper as a Modernist Architectural Design Environment’, published in Digital Modernism Heritage Lexicon (Springer Tracts, 2021). The editors have prefaced this with a short summary of the full essay. The essay describes transparent paper and its operative… Read More
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci
13.12.2021
The Rural Homes of Marcelo Ferraz and Francisco Fanucci13.12.2021
Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little houseStill neighbors a streamAnd still harbors its arbors Where our sertão remainsEvery happy little homeCooks on the coal cookerThe wood stove’s still blown[…] Where sertão remainsEvery little house is gladfor on the evenings we get our Hail-MaryAnd the pleasure of being alone ‘Casinha feliz’,… Read More
Movements of the Drawing Hand
08.12.2021
Movements of the Drawing Hand08.12.2021
How can you study the movements of the drawing hand? Although completed drawings can be interpreted, much the same way graphologists analyse the sequencing and flow of handwriting, can we see an architecture in the movements of the drawing hand? Can we be inside a drawing, and witness, as paper… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks
22.11.2021
Álvaro Siza: Seven Early Sketchbooks22.11.2021
– Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza
These films were made over four hours on the afternoon of Sunday 25 March 2018 in Álvaro Siza’s studio in Rua do Aleixo outside Porto. I had flown to Portugal that morning with the seven sketchbooks which we were to look through with Manuel Montenegro. Manuel and I had conceived… Read More
A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast
15.11.2021
A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast15.11.2021
Alberto Ponis was born in Genoa in 1933. He took his architecture degree in Florence in 1960. His father, Mario Alberto, had founded the M.I.T.A. (Manifattura Italiana Tappeti Artistici) in 1926 in Nervi, near Genoa. The company’s building was built by Luigi Daneri in 1940. Gio Ponti, Arnaldo Pomodoro and… Read More
Álvaro Siza: Fast and Slow Lines
20.10.2021
Álvaro Siza: Fast and Slow Lines20.10.2021
Álvaro Siza began working on the ‘Quinta da Malagueira’ project in 1977. In his sketchbooks, he would doodle iterations of the proposal over and over, together with other observational scenes, figures, calculations, and schedules. The sketches have various line qualities. Some are steadier, thicker in the middle, and thinner at… Read More
Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium
21.09.2021
Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium21.09.2021
In July 1958, one day before Faisal II was assassinated during the 14 July Revolution in Baghdad, the Iraqi Ministry of Development sent a telegram to Paris confirming Le Corbusier’s appointment to design the Olympic Stadium. Over the following months, while the programme and site were being clarified, his office… Read More
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt
02.09.2021
Notations (2016): Review & Excerpt02.09.2021
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
Sketches from Algiers
02.08.2021
Sketches from Algiers02.08.2021
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
36 Elevations
12.07.2021
36 Elevations12.07.2021
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
28.06.2021
Florian Beigel & Aru’s Pojagi House: Searching for the Essential28.06.2021
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
24.06.2021
Keeping a Notebook24.06.2021
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
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture
24.06.2022
Roland Simounet: De La Verité en Architecture24.06.2022
– Pierre Riboulet
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
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