Tag: urban form
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture
6 May 2024
Giuseppe Terragni’s Primordial Architecture6 May 2024
What does the bozzetto that the young Giuseppe Terragni made in 1926, together with Pietro Lingeri, for the competition for the Monumento ai Caduti (War Memorial) in Como have to tell us? It speaks to us of the complexity of its creator, a complexity that Terragni shares with Italian art… Read More
A Bath for Immortality
24 April 2024
A Bath for Immortality24 April 2024
It is 1971 and the city is Graz. ‘If we look at the city as a set of artefacts that can be modified over time, homogeneous and isotropic, correlated to the physical reality of the landscape and the territory, and at the same time if we refuse to take part… Read More
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter
23 April 2024
Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter23 April 2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
The Austrian architect Hans Hollein (1934–2014) studied under Clemens Holzmeister at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley. With the sculptor and designer Walter Pichler he introduced a body of… Read More
OMA: London—Foreplay
19 April 2024
OMA: London—Foreplay19 April 2024
This is the first post, in a series of six, titled OMA CONVERSATIONS. The series is the result of a collaboration between Drawing Matter and architect Richard Hall who, over the past two years, has conducted twenty-three in-depth conversations with key collaborators working with OMA during its formative years. Drawing… Read More
Masterplanning the University of London
27 March 2024
Masterplanning the University of London27 March 2024
Legend has it that Charles Holden promised the University of London a building that would last five hundred years. While there is no hard evidence for Holden’s claim, his Senate House (1932–37) looks as permanent as anything built in modern Britain. A 19-storey tower faced with granite and Portland stone,… Read More
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded
25 March 2024
Branzi, Observed: Autocatalytic, Earnestly Jaded25 March 2024
Andrea Branzi died on 9 October 2023 aged 84. The impact of one of his seminal works, No-Stop City, has been felt far and wide within architectural discourse. Since its production between 1967 and 1972, the drawings and collages of No-Stop City have haunted the camps within architectural academia that… Read More
The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour
14 March 2024
The Animated Wall: A Fragile Vigour14 March 2024
This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. A… Read More
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things
4 March 2024
Nobuo Sekine: The Weight of Things4 March 2024
‘A stone yearning for the sky.’[1] Such was the sort of rock Nobuo Sekine sought out at a quarry near Udine in the months prior to the opening of the 1970 Venice Biennale. A hulking, oblong piece of unfinished stone perched precariously upon a stainless-steel pillar, Sekine’s sculpture Phase of… Read More
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design
7 February 2024
Architectural Covers: A Site of Design7 February 2024
The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Between 1971 and 1973,… Read More
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury
2 February 2024
Charles Holden: A new campus for Bloomsbury2 February 2024
– Bill Sherman and Richard Temple
Quoted from the exhibition text of Charles Holden’s Master Plan: Building the Bloomsbury Campus, curated by Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute and Richard Temple, Archivist of the University of London. The exhibition continues until 17 March in the Chancellor’s Hall Lobby, First Floor, Senate House. More information here.… Read More
Careful Crudeness
31 January 2024
Careful Crudeness31 January 2024
At first glance, this image is a mess. An aerial photograph onto which a pen drawing of an undistinctive, modernist building structure has been mounted. Gouache is smeared in a few places in a seemingly half-hearted attempt to hide parts of the photograph and soften the collision of the two… Read More
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre
29 January 2024
Landing Square Scenarios: The Wilhelmina Pier & Luxor Theatre29 January 2024
Radical Scenarios for Rotterdam For a while in the 1990s, Berlin and Rotterdam were seen as embodiments of opposing strategies in city making. Postwar Berlin was the laboratory for the ‘Reconstruction of the European City’—blocks with 22m facades—while Rotterdam, largely destroyed by German bombing during WW2, became a zone of… Read More
Guy Debord—An Art of War
29 November 2023
Guy Debord—An Art of War29 November 2023
– Laurence Le Bras and Emmanuel Guy
The following is an extract from the book Emmanuel Guy, Laurence Le Bras, and Bibliothèque Nationale De France, Guy Debord: Un Art de La Guerre (Editions Gallimard, 2013), pp. 92–96 published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Guy Debord: an art of war’, presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on the François-Mitterrand… Read More
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers
9 November 2023
Protected: Emerging Ecologies: O.M. Ungers9 November 2023
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Repton does a Bernini – A crescent for The Ham
24 October 2023
Repton does a Bernini – A crescent for The Ham24 October 2023
Ever since 1743, when John Wood failed to get backers for his vast Royal Forum, the area to the south of South Parade has been treated like the campus of a nondescript university. The chequered gardens of Abbey Orchard have been supplanted by Manvers Street car park, while to the… Read More
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities
10 October 2023
Judit Reigl: Invisible Cities10 October 2023
Judit Reigl was ninety-two years old in 2015 when she started Dance of Death, her transcendent series of small-scale vanitas drawings. Having reached a stage where she could barely see her own pencil marks, Reigl found skulls to be a ready subject. She said she had drawn many skulls in… Read More
Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’
1 September 2023
Denise Scott Brown ‘From Soane to the Strip’1 September 2023
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
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
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review
10 April 2023
The City in Dispute (2023) – Review 10 April 2023
Climbing the majestic double staircase of the Palau de la Virreina, a building that hovers somewhere between the Baroque and the Rococo, one arrives at a small but intense exhibition on show at [La Virreina] Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona. Curated by María García Ruiz and Moisés Puente, it presents… Read More
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée
3 April 2023
Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longue Durée3 April 2023
This text is excerpted from Aldo Rossi. Insulae, edited by Nadejda Bartels, a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, run by the Tchoban Foundation (on display from 4 February – 14 May 2023). Drawing represented for Aldo Rossi the privileged… Read More
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection
13 February 2023
Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection13 February 2023
Michael Sorkin, in Drawings for Sale, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator: ‘the drawing as artefact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture’. Sorkin argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator… Read More
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville
23 November 2022
The Usonia Plot at Pleasantville23 November 2022
– Editors
Pleasantville, Westchester County, New York, was one of three co-operative Usonian communities founded in the late 1940s. The other two, The Acres (also known as Galesburg Country Homes) and Parkwyn Village were both near Kalamazoo, Michigan. They all involved Frank Lloyd Wright as the overall site planner and in each… Read More
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 2022
22 September 2022
Where in the World are We? Melbourne Venice Studios 202222 September 2022
Remote teaching as a pandemic consequence has already been a theme for Drawing Matter, in the January 2022 Melbourne University Venice Workshop it reached an almost surreal zenith. Remoteness is fundamental to Australia, whether the extreme separations of the outback or a pre-digital geographic estrangement from global cultural discourses. At… Read More
The Captive Globe
28 March 2024
The Captive Globe28 March 2024
– Reinier de Graaf
This essay is about a drawing—or rather, about the insight embedded within that drawing and the life it has taken on in the forty-five years since it was made. The drawing in question is The City of the Captive Globe. It was created in 1972, first published in 1978 by… Read More
theoretical & imaginary urban form projection (axonometric isometric) publication concept & diagram