Tag: theoretical & imaginary
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique
04.03.2021
Tradition and Modernity, Continuity and Critique04.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid has served as ‘the image of an absolute beginning’, as Rosalind Krauss affirmed in 1986 in ‘The Originality of… Read More
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise
01.03.2021
The Perpetual Race of Piranesi and the Tortoise01.03.2021
Melting reality, ancient history and fantasy into one, the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi hold an unparalleled allure that continues to entrance and captivate. They offer an escape into imagined and unknown worlds; each drawing an organism of its own, containing an immense depth of spatial layering and an extraordinary… Read More
Signature
15.02.2021
Signature15.02.2021
It’s just a small loose sheet of paper ripped off a notepad. Along its margins, an elegant round-cornered brown border, once enclosing an anonymous blank space of empty expectancy, now ceremoniously frames a mysteriously attractive, harmonious, yet utterly cryptic mark, struck and left upon its surface: a signature. By whose… Read More
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows
03.02.2021
Louis Kahn: In Praise of shadows03.02.2021
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
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse
22.01.2021
Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse22.01.2021
In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… Read More
Outside In
23.11.2020
Outside In23.11.2020
Music plays from behind a curtain. Lights come on and you see that the curtain runs along two sides of a carpet whose centre hosts a leopard skin cushion. There is a chair at one side of the carpet and at the opposite end, a single column. Not before long… Read More
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory
09.11.2020
Paolo Portoghesi: The Field Theory09.11.2020
Architects mediate the complexity of the world and their ideas through different instrumental modalities. Whether perspective drawings, proportional relationships, descriptive geometry, material prototypes, scaled models, maquettes or three-dimensional models – models serve the purpose of collecting and indexing information into measurable and rational systems so that the architectural project can… Read More
All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture
09.11.2020
All back to front: D’Aviler’s Cours D’Architecture09.11.2020
In Louis de Boulogne’s drawing, now in the Drawing Matter collection, Architecture appears as a young woman. She sits leaning on an altar with a Corinthian capital at her feet, compasses in one hand and a portrait of Vignola in the other. Behind her are the ruins of Rome. It… Read More
Startha Éagsula: Níall McLaughlin Architects on Basil Spence
04.11.2020
Startha Éagsula: Níall McLaughlin Architects on Basil Spence04.11.2020
This text has been excerpted from Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories (2020), a companion catalogue to Alternative Histories (2019) and published to accompany the third installation of Alternative Histories at the Irish Architectural Archive. Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories is now available to purchase from Drawing Matter’s bookshop, here. The… Read More
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)
27.10.2020
A New Administration Center For Los Angeles (1936)27.10.2020
Excerpted from ‘Architect and Engineer’ 1936 January by William Hamilton.
Trees Make A Plan
07.10.2020
Trees Make A Plan07.10.2020
The following text is the first of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us to reproduce the essays on… Read More
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War
29.09.2020
Writing Prize 2020: Figures of War29.09.2020
Niccolò Machiavelli concludes his treatise on the art of war (Dell’Arte della Guerra, 1521) with a series of diagrammatic ‘figures’ illustrating the arrangements of troops known as ordinanze. Rather than using human silhouettes, the ordinanza links alphabetical signs to specific roles and positions of the soldiers, reducing the army to… Read More
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted
31.08.2020
Superstudio: Monument Interrupted31.08.2020
The collages of Superstudio’s ‘Continuous Monument’ have always seemed to me like stills from an unseen film, each image framing a part of a wider scenography. Combining the collages does not make the larger reality of the monument any less elusive or fragmentary, akin to the way that remembered dreams… Read More
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’
23.07.2020
Dating Siza: The Malagueira ‘Cupula’23.07.2020
The unbuilt half-dome (referred to by the architect as the ‘cupula’) at the Quinta da Malagueira is the subject of a protracted design process that has lasted for over four decades. At the start of 2020, Álvaro Siza sent a drawing of the half-dome to Drawing Matter accompanied by letter… Read More
Venice Biennale (1985)
14.07.2020
Venice Biennale (1985)14.07.2020
The third edition of the Venice Biennale in 1985, ‘Progetto Venezia’, directed by Aldo Rossi, had two major themes: the priority given to the moment of planning and the comparison with the Venetian landscape. For the 1985 exhibition, architects were invited to display their designs for the ‘requalification or the… Read More
The Story of the Pool (1978)
19.06.2020
The Story of the Pool (1978)19.06.2020
In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these… Read More
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans
06.06.2020
SUPA Architects: Naked Plans06.06.2020
– Christian Schweitzer and Ryul Song
This drawing, the first in our ‘Naked Plan’ series, overlaps 107 A3 sheets of construction drawings for House P, a private house in Pyeonchang-dong, Seoul (2013-15). Stripped in Autocad of all information, such as image, text and mtext, line weight, saturation and lightness, only the basic lines remain. Through the… Read More
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)
04.06.2020
Welfare Palace Hotel (1978)04.06.2020
In the appendix to Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas’s retroactive manifesto for the island of Manhattan, the tacit logic of ‘Manhattanism’ is set free from its origins in the form of five architectural projects: The City of the Captive Globe, Hotel Sphinx, New Welfare Island, the Welfare Palace Hotel and the Floating Pool. Four of these… Read More
Animals
05.05.2020
Animals05.05.2020
– James Gowan and Ellis Woodman
excerpted from The Architecture of James Gowan: Modernity and Reinvention (2008)
Language & the Doorn Manifesto
14.04.2020
Language & the Doorn Manifesto14.04.2020
The following audio clips are extracts from an interview with Peter Smithson conducted in 1997 for the Architects’ Lives oral history project run by National Life Stories. To listen to the full interview, click here. On language Peter Smithson on the change from the use of French to English as the predominant language of… Read More
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)
08.04.2020
Postcard from Nowhere (Counterswimming)08.04.2020
Sixteen swim in synchrony. Bright red trunks, blue swim caps, in a perfectly choreographed 4 x 4 grid of bodies in motion. They swim in the shallow pale blue pool that contains them, as it floats in the ocean. They are about to collide with a dock that is too… Read More
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image
17.02.2021
Superstudio: Another Mirror Image17.02.2021
– Ludwig Engel
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
DMC sketch theoretical & imaginary landscape