Tag: topographic/cartographic
Drawings as Cosmovisions
12 August 2024
Drawings as Cosmovisions12 August 2024
My decision to become an architect was triggered by my love of drawing. But during my university years in the 1990s, when digital techniques became widespread, nothing was more distant than the relationship between architecture and manual drawing. Without hand-drawn images, the connection between the body and ideas was gone,… Read More
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping
26 February 2024
Tim Robinson: Deep Mapping26 February 2024
This text is an excerpt from Shallow Time: The Burren (Dpr-Barcelona and Irish Architecture Foundation, 2023), 73-74, written by Tom Cookson. The text is reproduced with permission from the Irish Architecture Foundation. How to communicate the topographic nature of landscape and lived experience on a map reproduced on paper? The composition… Read More
DMJ – The Stereoautograph
6 December 2023
DMJ – The Stereoautograph6 December 2023
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
Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris
29 November 2023
Mapping Cities: Barcelona and Paris29 November 2023
– Dibujantes CNT and Grand Marnier
Prompted by the publication of Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy’s text on Guy Debord’s situationist maps of Paris, a closer look at two ways to represent the experience of a city…
Capilla Pajaritos
24 August 2023
Capilla Pajaritos24 August 2023
The following text was written by Alberto Cruz as an account of the project for a small chapel outside of Santiago (1952–3; first published in Spanish in 1954). It describes an unfolding process of design, framed around the guiding principles of observation, act, and, form—the key tenets of Cruz’s architectural… Read More
DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey
18 August 2023
DMJ – The Art of Measuring Images: Albrecht Meydenbauer and the Invention of the Photographic Survey18 August 2023
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
Architectural manuals and Pacific speculations
23 May 2023
Architectural manuals and Pacific speculations23 May 2023
Lodged in an architectural archive at the bottom of the world, [1] Joshua Kirby’s 1755 book, Perspective of Architecture: a work entirely new […] announces that ‘All those lines that are boundaries to the several parts of Architecture, are either straight or circular; and therefore, those two different kinds of… Read More
Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’
12 May 2023
Bruno Taut’s ‘Alpine Architektur’12 May 2023
This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. In January 1917, the architect Bruno… Read More
A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast
15 November 2021
A Short History of Alberto Ponis on the Sardinian Coast15 November 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
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition
13 October 2021
Lines, Drawings, the Human Condition13 October 2021
– Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo
This conversation between Tim Ingold, Momoyo Kaijima, Andreas Kalpakci and Anh-linh Ngo was first published, in German translation, in issue 238 of ARCH+ (March 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the editors of ARCH+ for allowing us to publish the original English version of the text. Momoyo Kaijima: With… Read More
Folding Landscapes: The Maps of Tim Robinson
23 June 2021
Folding Landscapes: The Maps of Tim Robinson23 June 2021
While walking the land, I am the pen on the paper; while drawing this map, my pen is myself walking the land. I wanted to short circuit the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity, and try keep faith with reality. – Robinson We should maintain an awareness of the stories hidden… Read More
Cartographies of the Imagination
4 June 2021
Cartographies of the Imagination4 June 2021
– Kirsty Badenoch and Sayan Skandarajah
Drawing place is illusory. Maps may begin as transcriptions of a worldly order – a semblance of truth and objectivity – but in doing so, become acts of world-building that both belong to and are entirely removed from their starting point. In 2019, we first visited Shatwell Farm in the… Read More
I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day
31 May 2021
I Cut Mount Fuji Every Day31 May 2021
With a circumference of approximately 10cm, I compress the majestic mountain. I pressure it between my fingers and the board and I slice. The contours fall on the board; in a matter of minutes, they will turn once more into a fragrant and luminous mountain. The emotional downpour induced by… Read More
To assist
18 May 2021
To assist18 May 2021
Computer Assisted Drawings (CAD) have existed since the mid-60s. A young Ivan Sutherland received a doctorate at MIT introducing Sketchpad, a device that by the means of an optical pen allowed the direct edition of graphical objects. Around the 35th century BC, someone was writing the first hieroglyph text over… Read More
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review
4 May 2021
The Zilsel Thesis: A Review of Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps (2020): Review4 May 2021
In a series of essays and lectures developed between 1939 and 1943, the philosopher of science Edgar Zilsel identified three distinct sources of knowledge in the Renaissance. In the late-medieval period, writes Zilsel, the traditional learning associated with the universities was still theological and scholastic in character. The texts preserved… Read More
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS
30 March 2021
Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS30 March 2021
Review Making a book about making a building creates a special narrative challenge in the constant battle between reality and myth that vibrates through non-fiction publications and the ways in which we as readers engage with and interpret them. This is complicated even more when making a book about a… Read More
In search of an honest map
22 February 2021
In search of an honest map22 February 2021
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
Two Early Paintings with OMA
25 January 2021
Two Early Paintings with OMA25 January 2021
Here, Zoe Zenghelis, painter and founding member of OMA, recalls the making of two paintings now in the Drawing Matter collection. The first, pictured below, is an aerial view of the unbuilt Hotel Therma, and the second is a version of OMA’s entry to the Parc de la Villette competition.… Read More
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette
28 July 2020
Just Begin: The Convent Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette28 July 2020
– Stan Allen and José Oubrerie
‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More
OMA in Scheveningen
22 July 2020
OMA in Scheveningen22 July 2020
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
The Conservative (1941)
6 July 2020
The Conservative (1941)6 July 2020
All along the wide stony high street of Chipping Campden one is aware of stopped clocks. Time has been strenuously and persistently defied – almost successfully. Even the public telephone box – after a short struggle with the Post Office – has been allowed to wear the protective colouring of… Read More
Fresh and Surprised
2 July 2020
Fresh and Surprised2 July 2020
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
Through a Glass Darkly
6 June 2023
Through a Glass Darkly6 June 2023
– Niall Hobhouse
This text was first published in DMJournal No.1: The Geological Imagination (2023). Print copies of the Journal, and subscriptions for the first three issues, are now available through our online bookshop. We are currently accepting abstracts for the third issue of DMJournal. Find more information here. Since Burckhardt’s discovery of Petra in 1812, Europeans and… Read More
topographic/cartographic landscape DMJ 1 – The Geological Imagination