Tag: survey

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

DMJ – Devices of Dream-Like Precision: Tracing the Streets of Kyoto using Photogrammetry and Layered Drawing

Sayan Skandarajah

There have been frequent attempts to represent the city of Kyoto as a coherent whole, from the cloud-swept panorama of the 17th-century Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes In and Around Kyoto) folding screen paintings to the digital diorama of the GIS-driven Virtual Kyoto Project. Whilst these portraits of the city have relied on… Read More

The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge

The Future of the Past: The ‘Round Church’, Cambridge

Nikolaus Pevsner

The war to restore to churches ritual and at the same time architectural dignity was waged by one man and one society, the man being a fervent convert to Catholicism, the society calling itself Catholic too, but meaning what is called Anglo-Catholic. They operated independently, but appreciated one another. The… Read More

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Sydney’s Infill Facades

Ellie Skinner

This survey intends to draw and identify the material and facade arrangements of office buildings in Sydney. Built between 1950 and 1980, the selected buildings are examples of a certain type of post-World War II city infill fabric, characterised by their 4 to 16-storey building heights, shared party walls, fine-grain… Read More

Banham in Buffalo

Banham in Buffalo

Brian Carter

[Our] main emphasis in this course has been on using primary sources in studying architectural history. By this I mean that we have been using the building itself as the first source of information about the history of the building.[1] Reyner Banham moved to America in 1976 to take up… Read More

DMJ – The Stereoautograph

DMJ – The Stereoautograph

Pablo Garcia

The Zeiss Stereoautograph 1914 Bild II is a mammoth device (Fig.1). It weighs over 400kg and has the same footprint as a Smart Car. When it was retired and donated to the Zeiss Archive in 2004, the Technical University of Hanover had to remove part of its roof in order to lift… Read More

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Drawing Research Platform, Somerset, 2023, ENAC Summer Workshop

Alberto Johnsson, Arthur Masure, Daniel Nitsche, Toby Pullen and Alexander Turner

During a one-week summer workshop at Shatwell Farm, students from the EPFL, alongside young architects from the UK, explored drawing as a key tool of architecture and engineering. Through research into the Drawing Matter collection and the construction of survey drawings, the workshop used drawing as a corporeal form of… Read More

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’

Denise Scott Brown

The following text is an excerpt from Denise Scott Brown’s 2018 Soane Medal lecture, written by Thomas Weaver, and developed out of a series of conversations between Denise Scott Brown and Thomas Weaver in July 2018. I have never thought of myself as a photographer, only an architect and urbanist,… Read More

DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey

DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey

Emma Letizia Jones

In 1868, the little-known project manager and government surveyor Albrecht Meydenbauer (1834 – 1921) climbed to the top of the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin to shoot the first 360-degree photographic record of the city. In contrast to the idealistic, hyper-real clarity of a more famous painted panorama of Berlin made… Read More

‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)

William Burges

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

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings

George Saumarez Smith

As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More

Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium

Survey: Le Corbusier, Roland Garros stadium

Matthew Wells

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

Survey: John Goldicutt, Temple of Vespasian

Survey: John Goldicutt, Temple of Vespasian

Matthew Wells

Climbing and surveying the ruins of Rome was potentially dangerous, and there are reports of near-fatal accidents involving falls from height. George Wightwick, who would be employed by Soane on his return from Italy, advised students ‘not to risk [their] neck in measuring, for the thousandth time, a Roman ruin’.… Read More

Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia

Survey: Piazza Grande, Gubbio, Perugia

Biba Dow

This painting was made in the early evening in the main square of the medieval town of Gubbio, in central Italy (Perugia). Reached by climbing up narrow winding streets, the Piazza Grande opens out as a belvedere to the southwest, looking across rooftops to the plain below the Apennine foothills.… Read More

Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis

Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis

Charlotte Hart

This study of Le Palais de Darius a Persepolis was made by Pascal Coste (b. 1787 Marseille, France) in 1840 as part of an archeological survey of the Persian City of Persepolis. Through a combination of plan and perspective, Coste portrayed the symmetrical arrangement and elaborate construction of the ancient… Read More

Fernand Pouillon’s Survey of the Abbey of Le Thoronet

Fernand Pouillon’s Survey of the Abbey of Le Thoronet

Oscar Mather

The following text by Oscar Mather is excerpted from Issue 6 of the Journal of Civic Architecture, edited by Patrick Lynch: https://www.canalsidepress.com/joca-issue-6/. Fernand Pouillon insisted throughout his life that his sole concern in architecture was construction, and he described himself as a maître d’œuvre, in a sense closest to the… Read More

Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things

Glasgow School of Art: The Measure of Things

Paul Clarke

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

Re-presenting the Rococo

Re-presenting the Rococo

David Valinsky

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

In search of an honest map

In search of an honest map

Nicholas Herrmann

We don’t experience place as maps would have us believe. We might technically exist within the map, an orientation marker besieged by the total sum of data, every landmark, park and street swarming around us at all times. But our perspective is only partial – a patchwork of neighbourhoods, structures… Read More

Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin

Drawing Sacred Forests and Courtyards in South Benin

Quentin Nicolaï

The following conversation between the editors of Accattone and Quentin Nicolaï was first published in Accattone 6 (2019). It documents research carried out by Quentin Nicolaï in Abomey, Benin, between January 2014 and June 2018. Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the magazine’s editors for allowing us reproduce… Read More

S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of

S.A.U.L. 4th Year: De Rerum Natura / In the Manner Of

Gerard Carty, Elizabeth Hatz and Fionn O'Leary

In the Autumn of 2019, tutors Elizabeth Hatz and Gerard Carty visited the Drawing Matter archive with their fourth-year students from the School of Architecture and the University of Limerick (SAUL). Below is a record of their visit and its place in the context of the fourth-year studio. Tutors interested… Read More

OMA in Scheveningen

OMA in Scheveningen

Willem Jan Neutelings

Scheveningen is a reef on which different architectonic and urban visions have run ashore. – Rem Koolhaas [1] What a surprise to see this 40 year old drawing! I made it as a young collaborator of OMA in Rotterdam in 1982. It is an analytic sketch in ink and color… Read More

Fresh and Surprised

Fresh and Surprised

Julian Lewis

Indische Buurt is a suburban area at the eastern edge of Amsterdam that is rich with diverse ethnicities, building ages and spatial experiences. The streets are named after islands and, as a territory historically built upon reclaimed land, there is an overriding feeling of an archipelago: islands that are places… Read More

Library of Babel

Library of Babel

James White

In its most rudimentary form, a LIDAR scan is a simple act of call and response. Thousands of beams of light leave the scanner and receive a measurement based on the distance and intensity (essentially a value of reflectivity) of the objects they collide with. The fascination in these scans… Read More

Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer

Álvaro Siza: Drawn Closer

Álvaro Siza

This text was originally published in Architecture through Drawing. Drawn Closer is a year-long collaboration between Domus and Drawing Matter, edited by Sarah Handelman. Each issue of the magazine features one architect discussing a drawing which they recognise as a transformative moment in their work. Domus 2020 is guest-edited by David Chipperfield. I began using… Read More