Writer: Helen Thomas

Glarner Wirtschaftsarchiv

Glarner Wirtschaftsarchiv

Helen Thomas

Through an unprepossessing door tucked into the corner of two buildings located at the edge of a precinct both rural and industrial is the entrance to the kind of magic world that archives often hide. Founded 20 years ago by Dr. Sybill Kindlimann of the influential local family, Blumer, the… Read More

Building as Drawing: the Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm

Building as Drawing: the Cowshed (2021) at Shatwell Farm

Helen Thomas

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.… Read More

Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review

Vitruvius Without Text (2022) – Review

Helen Thomas

This provocative book raises many questions about books themselves, including through the way in which it is published. As the first in a gta Verlag series that works the grain of open access by presenting a combined digital and analogue publication simultaneously, it is an interesting choice. The printed book,… Read More

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt

Helen Thomas

‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More

Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review

Hélène Binet: The Intimacy of Making, Three Historical Sites in Korea (2021): Review

Helen Thomas

What is a myth, today? I shall give at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.– Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957 This seemingly simple book is a thought-provoking collection of things. There is a lot of room for implication… Read More

Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt

Jesús Vassallo’s Epics in the Everyday (2019): Review & Excerpt

Helen Thomas

Review The compelling question of reality, or rather its representation as realism presented as an aesthetic category, acts as the organising principle of this interesting book. This is an investigation of the relationship between photography, architecture and the problem of realism, as its subtitle explains. Its author, Jesús Vassallo, immediately… Read More

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS

Flores & Prats Sala Beckett International Drama Centre (2020): REVIEW & EXCERPTS

Helen Thomas

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

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Yasmeen Lari: Drawn Closer

Helen Thomas

In 2005, earthquakes in northern Pakistan killed 80,000 people. This was an eye-opener for me, and I was drawn to work with these remote, impoverished mountain communities, to help to rebuild their lives. Having retired from conventional architectural practice, and this was something I’d never done before. Unlike NGOs offering… Read More

Six Architects on their Dream Desks

Six Architects on their Dream Desks

Roz Barr, Biba Dow, Elizabeth Hatz, Emma Letizia Jones, Stephanie Macdonald and Helen Thomas

Drawing Matter recently acquired this design for a table, below. Although the work’s last sale in 1972 attributed the drawing to Thomas Chippendale, we are (perhaps wishfully) hoping that it might be an architect’s own design for desk. The sheet set off a flurry of chatter about the platonic spaces… Read More

Lina Bo Bardi: Public Plaza and Museum of Art São Paolo

Lina Bo Bardi: Public Plaza and Museum of Art São Paolo

Helen Thomas

This text is excerpted from Drawing Architecture (Phaidon, 2018) by Helen Thomas, which brings together over 250 drawings, with short narratives for each one about the circumstances in which they were made, the techniques used to produce them, and the realities that they were depicting.

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Sphere

Helen Thomas

Frail and delicate, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s drawing of a geodesic sphere floats, without context, in the space of the paper it inhabits. More than the form it reveals, the net of thin, red lines expresses the presence of the space within it. A perspective effect emanates from the central point… Read More

Hugh Ferriss

Hugh Ferriss

Helen Thomas

In 1916 a series of laws came into force in the city of New York called the Zoning Ordinance, the first of its kind in America, which regulated building use, area and height of new buildings.