Writer: Nicholas Olsberg

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

Frank Lloyd Wright at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

The Frank Lloyd Wright collection is of primary interest from 1936 to 1951, and especially for a small group of studies and presentations for the shaping of domestic space, dwelling within landscape, and interior fittings. There are also important isolated drawings for a prairie house, Midway Gardens, the Johnson Administration… Read More

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Louis-Hippolyte Lebas at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

To view the complete Drawing Matter Collections of Louis-Hippolyte Lebas, click here. French architect Louis-Hippolyte Lebas (1782–1867) trained with Percier and Fontaine, whose assistant he remained for some years; working in Paris, both independently and in collaboration with Éloi Labarre and others from the mid 1820s; professor of history of… Read More

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

Hans Hollein at Drawing Matter

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

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter

Editors and Nicholas Olsberg

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940), trained first at the Royal Institute of Technology (where he would teach from 1931), and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, undertook an extensive study tour of Greece and Italy, and opened his own practice around 1913, working entirely in Sweden, and… Read More

Diplomatics and Instrumentality of the Drawing / William Butterfield

Diplomatics and Instrumentality of the Drawing / William Butterfield

Nicholas Olsberg

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. In… Read More

William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations

William Butterfield: Forms and Transformations

Nicholas Olsberg

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. The town of Torquay dates from the days when… Read More

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Richard Neutra’s Corona Avenue School

Nicholas Olsberg

This project scrapbook traces the publication and exhibition history of Richard Neutra’s experimental Corona Avenue School, built in 1935 after the Los Angeles earthquake of 1933. The material for this scrapbook has been compiled by Nicholas Olsberg; his earlier text on the school for Drawing Matter can be read here.

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Geography of Hope: Hans Hollein and John Hejduk

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the final of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Extrusion: Hollein in the Southwest The Austrian architect Hans Hollein, for many years a leading figure in the international avant-garde, was a student at… Read More

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Geography of Hope: Bruce Goff

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the third of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. ‘Aparture’: Bruce Goff in the Parched Land ‘For the Panhandle, …1956 became the seventh straight year of drouth. Except for one savage blizzard, it… Read More

Geography of Hope: John Lautner

Geography of Hope: John Lautner

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the second of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. Suspension and Poise: Lautner at Mountainside The first photograph of John Lautner that we know, shows him as a boy of about fourteen, standing… Read More

Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio

Geography of Hope: Adolfo Natalini and Superstudio

Nicholas Olsberg

This is the first of four extracts taken from an article first published in issue 40 on nonsite.org, dedicated to ‘New Views on Modern Architecture at Mid-Century’. As we descended into a World War that threatened the obliteration of decency and history, the poet Archibald Macleish, then Librarian of Congress,… Read More

The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair

The Work of Ernest and Esther Born: World’s Fair

Nicholas Olsberg

Ernest and Esther Born trained as architects at Berkeley in the early 1920s and worked with great distinction in all aspects of architecture and the allied arts, from graphics and illustration to display design and architectural photography. This project marks one of their first endeavours on returning to San Francisco… Read More