Writer: Gordon Shrigley
Materia 4: Brick
10.01.2023
Materia 4: Brick10.01.2023
This text is the fourth in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Coarse rectangular lumps of clay mixed with straw and water, small enough to be carried in one or two hands, are laid… Read More
Materia 3: Red Oxide
30.09.2022
Materia 3: Red Oxide30.09.2022
This text is the third in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The first and second texts in the series, on render and corrugated iron, can be read here. Architects are subsumed within… Read More
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron
14.07.2022
Materia 2: Corrugated Iron14.07.2022
This text is the second in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. Forthcoming texts will include thoughts on oxide-red paint, in-situ concrete, fired brick, plate glass and plastic. The first text… Read More
Materia: Render
12.04.2022
Materia: Render12.04.2022
Render, a sticky viscous coloured slop traditionally applied by hand with a float, hawk and trowel to solid form, first as inchoate lumps, then smoothed down or mottled, to scatter particles of light in diffuse haphazard ways. Inaugurated as the application of mere ground to wall, mud render allowed a… Read More
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive
26.07.2021
Insignificance 4: Self-reflexive26.07.2021
Whoever decides to study the conditions of a practice of imagining architecture through/as line will, I am afraid, be left in despair. Once the theatrical mask of line’s incontrovertible instrumentality is seen to slip, line’s solidity, its all too evident honesty as a simple mimetic tool, turns up by and… Read More
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work
09.06.2021
Insignificance 3: Mourning Work09.06.2021
All drawings contain traces of all previously drawn mediations. [1] All drawings are silent acts of memorialising (by employing inter-subjective readings of iconography, lineage, parody, reverie and reflexivity) what has been drawn before, or thought to have been so, or simply, what has been, consciously misplaced. [2] The text above… Read More
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy
19.05.2021
Insignificance 2: Distinction – Polysemy19.05.2021
The following texts are excerpted from Gordon Shrigley, Insignificance: A short discourse on the physical and ideational economy of line within architectural representation (Solitude Editions, 1998). Now, twenty years after Insignificance was first published, Gordon Shrigley has revisited the publication for a series of postings on Drawing Matter. Each of these posts connect… Read More
Insignificance 1: Discipline
04.05.2021
Insignificance 1: Discipline04.05.2021
The space of the architectural imagination resides within the discourses of line. This space defines the boundaries of a practice of conceptualising the laws of the place [1] whereby through an array of ordinances, the architectural line constitutes ‘the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyse… Read More
Materia 5: Timber
18.04.2023
Materia 5: Timber18.04.2023
– Gordon Shrigley
This text is the final instalment in a series by Gordon Shrigley titled ‘Materia’ in which the architect meditates on the physical and semiotic nature of a number of everyday construction products. The language of architectural drawing, although appearing to promise an infinite arena for self-projection, ultimately fails to contain and express… Read More
projection (axonometric isometric) detail materia (editorial series) section