Tag: student work

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

A Poetic Peak: Architecture and planning at the AA in the 1930s

Editors and John Summerson

In 2022, Drawing Matter acquired nearly 100 drawings by the architect and urban planner Elizabeth Chesterton. Mostly for projects done while studying at the Architectural Association (1933–38), the group includes drawing exercises, such as colour theory, sciography and graphic design, and a wide variety of buildings at different scales, from… Read More

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

The First Exercise, One Door and One Window

Tania Garduño Israde

In 2003, at the troubled age of eighteen, I started a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. The first semester was a disappointment, a disaster even. The extremely hierarchical and academic system in Italy was terribly discouraging for creativity and questioning. By raising your hand to… Read More

Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle

Ulmer House Extension Proposal: Baumschlager & Eberle

Francesco Paini

This drawing is a print of a hand drawing I made eighteen years ago on a roll of tracing paper. The original drawing, made with rapidograph pens and a pencil, is now lost. Last month this blueprint was moved to Drawing Matter’s archive. Drawing Matter asked me to explain why… Read More

Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm

Design Starts: Loughborough School of Architecture at Shatwell Farm

Benjamin Machin

The following is an account of a visit to Drawing Matter in March 2022 made by Benjamin Machin and his students at the Loughborough School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering – Alina Abdulwahid, Nyewuna Amadi, Jemima Dabell, Beckie Downs, Lewis Foster-Jeapes, Will Jones, Will Mennell, Danielle Riley, Joe Tolley,… Read More

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Adaptations: A Teaching Studio at Cornell

Roz Barr

Options Studio was an Elective Module at Cornell University led by Roz Barr. The act of making means engaging with an idea that can be made, unmade, and reconsidered before being realised. Model-making has a critical role in formulating and realising an idea. Materiality and form are developed through discussions… Read More

Movements of the Drawing Hand

Movements of the Drawing Hand

Paul Clarke

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

Siza at sixteen

Siza at sixteen

Manuel Montenegro and Álvaro Siza

Pouco a pouco, quase sem dar por isso, o carvão começou a não partir, o papel a não manchar, o miolo de pão a manter a plasticidade, o fôlego a aumentar. E a confiança. Slowly but steadily, unwittingly, the lead began to not break, paper to not stain, the bread… Read More

Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)

Colin Rowe: Piazza Augusto Imperatore (1995)

Colin Rowe

– Colin Rowe, 1995. Excerpted from Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Alexander Caragonne (London: MIT Press, 1996).

Origins in Translation

Origins in Translation

Mari Lending

Broken bits of ancient architecture piled up in the foreground of a printed page is a topos in the canon of architectural publications. An early example takes place in the frontispiece of Sebastiano Serlio’s book on antiquities. Produced for the first edition of the third book, written in Italian and published in… Read More

ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino

ETH Zurich: Casting the Cornice in Ticino

Emma Letizia Jones and Erik Wegerhoff

From the fifteenth century onwards, the Swiss region of Ticino was famous for its stuccatori – the skilled decorative plaster workers that migrated down to Italy in search of work ornamenting the great palaces and churches of the Renaissance. Further generations of these craftsmen made their way over the Gotthard pass to… Read More

Drawings’ Conclusions

Drawings’ Conclusions

Stan Allen

The Campo Marzio project had its origins in a series of drawings done as far back as 1979, when I was a student at Cooper Union. I entered Cooper as a transfer student with a BA already in hand. I was originally placed in second year, but after a semester… Read More

Shatwell DrawingScape

Shatwell DrawingScape

Ana Araujo

This year a group of 12 students from the Intermediate School at the Architectural Association, London, are developing proposals for the Shatwell site. They take inspiration from the Drawing Matter collection to create exhibition spaces to display and celebrate the culture of drawing. The work ranges from speculative interpretations of… Read More

Notes on the 2017 Summer School

Notes on the 2017 Summer School

Nana Biamah-Ofosu and Bushra Mohamed

Drawing, Making, Thinking ‘Working in philosophy, like work in architecture in many respects, is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things, (and what one expects of them).’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Diary, 1931 Nana Biamah-Ofosu: In Wittgenstein’s words I recognise my own pursuit… Read More

Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa

Enric Miralles: La Gran Casa

Javier Contreras

Few projects better represent Enric Miralles’ first stance towards architectural drawing than his own final degree project, La Gran Casa (The Large House), which he worked on with Marciá Codinachs and submitted to the Barcelona School of Architecture in 1978. Seven drawings, each about the size of a bed sheet (118.80 × 237.60 cm), define… Read More

A Space / Two Spaces

A Space / Two Spaces

Anthony Vidler

The following exercise was given by Anthony Vidler as part of a workshop for LSA students on drawing on 31 June 2017. A ‘Ted Talk’ in Drawing Your client desires a space: not too large, not too small. Determine its size to accommodate:      Reading     Writing     Sleeping … Read More

The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s

The Town: The Dream of Unity in the 1960s

Jean-Paul Jungmann

Staying on the theme of images and theoretical propositions from the sixties, the environment of the architectonic avant-gardes was that of the groups thought radical – they were Italian, Austrian, British and American (Archizoom, Superstudio, Archigram and others) and were known for their innovative graphic design and spectacular photomontages which… Read More

Michael Webb

Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian

In his drawings for the Sin Centre, Michael Webb constantly returns to the parts of the project that are to do with movement – the undulant mechanical escalators and the complex vehicle system through which cars enter and flow through the building on ramps that loop around, cross over and… Read More

Malagueira and Évora, Portugal

Malagueira and Évora, Portugal

Cathy Hawley and Hugh Strange

School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University This year we have been examining the relationship between the ancient Roman, medieval and baroque city of Évora and the adjacent Malagueira public housing development – some 1100 low-rise units designed by Álvaro Siza from 1977 onwards in the aftermath of the revolution… Read More

High Ground

High Ground

Colette Sheddick and Pierre d'Avoine

School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University We have researched the Derwent Valley World Heritage Site (DVWHS) over the last three years. This year we investigated the impact of infrastructure on community and landscape. Transport networks and sites of extraction have scarred the English landscape over millennia. The pragmatics of… Read More

Beyond Object-ness, a Good House

Beyond Object-ness, a Good House

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou

The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University In the design research we do in practice and in our discussions with students, we are continuously working with ideas of space. We are not interested in form following function.  Firstly it should be a good room,… Read More

Henri Labrouste

Henri Labrouste

Barry Bergdoll

The following has been excerpted from Labrouste (1801-1875), Architecte : La structure mise en lumière, 2012. In 1840 Labrouste plays an essential role in a political spectacle in which the stakes are high for the faltering regime of Louis Philippe: the return of Napoleon’s ashes that will be buried in the… Read More

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb: Sin Centre

Michael Webb

The first thing you will notice about the Sin Centre, or Entertainments Centre as it was initially called, is that it lacks entertainments. Pour over the plans, but you will find no drawing lines suggesting the presence of a bowling alley or a restaurant or even a theatre. I forgot… Read More

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

View the action, neck or talk (1965)

Michael Webb

All this can, and is meant to happen on the parking ramps of the Sin Centre: couples bring along their own mobile living room and view the action, neck or talk.