Writer: Mark Dorrian

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 2

Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson

This is the second part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: Moving on to the Villa Auto and Clandeboye projects, both were sited… Read More

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 1

Peter Wilson and Mark Dorrian in conversation – Part 1

Mark Dorrian and Peter Wilson

This is the first part of an edited transcript of a conversion held in Thurloe Sq, London, on 25 July 2020. Peter Wilson’s exhibition ‘Indian Summer and Thereafter’ had opened at Betts Project the previous evening. Mark Dorrian: What led you to architecture to begin with, Peter? You began studying… Read More

Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Peter Wilson in the Empire of Signs

Mark Dorrian

‘Geometric, rigorously drawn, and yet always signed somewhere with an asymmetrical fold or knot.’[1] While this could be a concise description of Peter Wilson’s work, it is in fact Roland Barthes writing in his book Empire of Signs (1970) about what he described as the Japanese ‘ecstasy of the package’.[2] Barthes was struck by… Read More

DMJ 1 – The Geological Imagination

DMJ 1 – The Geological Imagination

Mark Dorrian and Kurt Forster

DMJournal–Architecture and Representation is a new peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the exploration of practices, histories and material cultures of drawing in architecture and related fields. The first issue The Geological Imagination has now been published. Purchase Issue 1 / Purchase a subscription to Issues 1–3 Editors’ Introduction Sir John Soane imagined turning into stone. The episode… Read More

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

‘Then There Was War’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as Nuclear Criticism

Mark Dorrian

As my title indicates, this text will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France… Read More

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Architecture as Drawing

Mark Dorrian and Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Drawing Matter is delighted to present three texts by Alberto Pérez-Gómez on architecture and its representation, the first writings by him to be carried on the Drawing Matter website. The first, ‘Architecture as Drawing’, is an early essay that initially appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1982, a… Read More

Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia

Pan Scroll Zoom 20: 10PM in Inner Mongolia

Mark Dorrian

This is the final episode in the Pan Scroll Zoom series, edited by Fabrizio Gallanti. It was written in April 2021 and first published in print in Drawing Matter Extracts 3: Pan Scroll Zoom. Mark Dorrian is the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape… Read More

Liquid Paper

Liquid Paper

Mark Dorrian

In The Praise of Hemp-Seed, John Taylor – the self-styled Jacobean ‘water poet’ – at one point asks why poets have never sung the virtues of the plant before. It is, he answers himself, because their words run dry in the face of the limitless goods it brings – ‘the… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Mark Dorrian in conversation with Michael Webb, Episode 3

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

The third episode of Michael Webb’s conversation with Mark Dorrian resumes with the fate of the Sin Centre model. The piece is published to mark the entry of the first part of a new model of the Sin Centre into the Drawing Matter collection. The conversation took place on Wednesday,… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 2

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: I’ve loaded some images – Michael, by the way, doesn’t know what’s coming up. After showing this, the drawing of the building, I thought it would be useful to show a couple of slides about the context in which this project then appeared. The Furniture Manufacturers Building is… Read More

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Drawing, Movement and Medium: Michael Webb in conversation with Mark Dorrian, Episode 1

Mark Dorrian and Michael Webb

Mark Dorrian: Hello everyone – it’s a real pleasure to welcome Professor Michael Webb, our George Simpson Visiting Professor this year. Michael is a very important and interesting architect, closely associated with Archigram, of which he was a member. He has a fascinating architectural trajectory and development, which involves the early… Read More

Notes on the Sketchbook

Notes on the Sketchbook

Mark Dorrian

When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… 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