Period: c21st

Imaginal Cloud Spaces

Imaginal Cloud Spaces

Sayan Skandarajah

Many hours can be spent on what art historian Mary Berry calls ‘the sheer act of looking’ at the Japanese folding-screen paintings titled Rakuchu Rakugai zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto). [1] Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such paintings captured a seemingly complete image of the capital city. Through the consistent use of… 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

The Matter of Drawing

The Matter of Drawing

Freddie Phillipson

The Primitive Hut staggers into three dimensions. Wiry pen scribbles go technicolour, underground. A vermiculated arch becomes an intricately hollowed monolith. A coat of fur replaces the ragged edge where plaster gave way to brick. We are not in a hall of mirrors; instead we are looking at a group… Read More

Grandorge’s Pavilion

Grandorge’s Pavilion

David Grandorge

The timber pavilion shown in the film is being transported to its third incarnation, and from inside another shed to its second locale in Shatwell farmyard, where it will serve as a new temporary office for the Timber Frame Company Ltd. The TFC constructed the Peter Smithson Obelisk that has… Read More

Zaha Hadid: Post-its

Zaha Hadid: Post-its

Michael Wolfson

This is all Zaha’s hand. When she is drawing there is a directionality – you are looking from the top, at a plan, extruded or in perspective. These sketches are relatively preliminary but certainly not initial – they are too defined. She is developing a composition, but already thinking about… Read More

Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919

Tom de Paor: On Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Theater der Massen, Berlin, 1919

Tom de Paor

The drawing is thinking, the same mark used over and over, up and down, hurdling scales quickly, the pulled edge of the sheet mimics the line. There is one idea – on the right, closer up – a  study after or rehearsal for the three-quarter view bleached out from the… Read More

Hugh Strange Architects

Hugh Strange Architects

We worked on the design of the Drawing Matter Archive in Somerset from September 2011 through to completion of the building in February 2014, providing a building of two halves with a studio space for day-to-day working and an adjacent space for the storage and occasional display of the clients’… Read More

Conjunction and Incongruity

Conjunction and Incongruity

Polly Gould

The word archive, meaning both the collection of documents and the building that houses them, is doubled in its meaning and it is not necessarily clear which one precedes the other. Drawing Matter Open Day highlighted in interesting ways the relation of causality between building and drawing as document or… Read More

Riet Eeckhout

Riet Eeckhout

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The façade is the window to the soul of architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018

The façade is the window to the soul of architecture: Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018

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Mark Ericson

Mark Ericson

Mark Ericson

This drawing is part of a series that interrogates the orthographic drawing techniques of Guarino Guarini (1624–1683) set out in his posthumous treatise, Architettura civile, (1737). While some of the drawings from the series deal with the direct documentation of his orthographic drawings, this particular drawing translates his written and drawn instructions… Read More

Foster + Partners

Foster + Partners

Norman Foster

Following on from Farshid Moussavi’s curatorial decision to create a display of construction drawings that showcase the ‘full complexity of the different systems and parts of buildings’, I chose this compelling BIM drawing from the Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus project, which suitably illustrates our integrated design approach. Throughout the… Read More

Three Timber Constructions

Three Timber Constructions

David Grandorge

When forested and harvested responsibly timber can be considered as a sustainable, renewable resource. With regard to its use as the material of choice in these self-build projects, it has two distinct advantages: firstly, it is fairly cheap relative to other building products. Secondly, it is a democratic material –… Read More

Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects

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Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion

Architectural Ethnography: Japan Pavilion

Helen Thomas

Flooded with light cast across alluringly animated walls, the Japan Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice is lined with drawings gathered together under the name of Architectural Ethnography. Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow Wow has been developing the thinking underlying this method of observing and recording the human environment since the… Read More

Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus

Elizabeth Hatz: Line, Light, Locus

Elizabeth Hatz

This is a Drawing Room, a with-drawing room. It is simply a love-declaration to the architectural drawing. Four walls, three large doorways. One end calmer, the other more open. The first thing decided is a table-bench; the drawing flat on the tabletop – like when you draw it – and… Read More

Alexander Brodsky: The Shed

Alexander Brodsky: The Shed

Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37

Alberto Campo Baeza: Sketchbook No. 37

Neil Bingham

Drawings, personal notes and poems flow across nearly 170 little pages and three months of Alberto Campo Baeza’s life, recorded during 2010 in an architectural sketchbook that he presented to the V&A in 2015. While scripted predominantly in Spanish, much is penned in English in which Campo Baeza is fluent.… Read More

Empathy

Empathy

Andrew Clancy

Being that can be understood is language. – Hans-Georg Gadamer One of the items in the Drawing Matter collection is a notebook once owned by Álvaro Siza. In it is this sketch, made of the Royal Academy London, where he was asked to consider making some work for an exhibition.… Read More

Remembered Space

Remembered Space

Deanna Petherbridge

A subtle and beguiling assemblage of recent works by Celia Scott is appropriately mounted on the plywood walls of the intimate Velorose Gallery, Charterhouse Square, London (13th April to 18th May 2018). Plywood, aluminium and carefully modulated surfaces that are revealed or obscured by spray paint are the stuff of… Read More

Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini

The tryptic Ink on Mirror is part of a collection of elevation studies developed over the past three years by my office, Atelier Manferdini. My reason for compiling a suite of digital sketches was rooted in the belief that for the past twenty years computers have been able to produce new geometrical… Read More

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn Architects

David Kohn

se two drawings of the Hounslow gate, however, belong to a different kind of drawing, which happens less frequently, possible only every few months. It often happens at a moment in the design process when progress is slowing, the range of issues we are exploring seems too restricted, a sense… Read More

Dominique Perrault Architecte

Dominique Perrault Architecte

Dominique Perrault

Pavilion Dufour, Château de Versailles, Developed Horizontal Wood Blades, Wall Covering began as a working document, resulting from the exchanges and developments between the acoustician, my team and the company engaged to build the acoustical panels covering the walls of the auditorium. This document immediately caught my attention because it seemed… Read More

Nicholas Grimshaw

Nicholas Grimshaw

Nicholas Grimshaw

This axonometric of the Arthur Phillip High School illustrates the very inner workings of the building. Stripped bare of its materiality – the steel and concrete frame, the inner and outer facades and interior finishes – to reveal the network of elements which make the building come alive. These vital… Read More