Visit The Archive

Stephen Taylor, Cowshed at Shatwell Farm, 2012.

COVID-19: If you are interested in visiting the archive or Shatwell Farm please email matt@drawingmatter.org for more information.

The archive and farmyard at Shatwell welcome over 1,200 visitors to the site each year, the majority of whom come as groups of architectural students, architects, museum patrons, but also individual researchers pursuing a specific line of enquiry.

We are open by appointment only and prefer visits Tuesday to Friday, or on Saturday mornings in special circumstances.

Practical notes for visiting and information about other sites nearby can be downloaded here.

Inside the Drawing Matter archive (designed by Hugh Strange, 2014). Photo: Mitch Corrigan and Eliot Johnson.

Individuals

Drawing Matter welcomes individuals whose research dovetails with material in the collection. If you are interested in visiting, please write to registrar@drawingmattercollections.com with details of your research.

Groups

We are open to visiting groups during the following two periods in 2020:

Tuesday 11 February – Friday 29 May
Tuesday 29 September – Friday 4 December

Drawing Matter asks for a donation of £12.50 per person from those interested in a tour of the site, which goes towards a student scholarship at the annual Architectural Drawing Summer School. Workshops based on the drawings in the archive, developed by the Drawing Matter team in collaboration with group leaders, can be organised for an additional fee (starting at £400), depending on the number of visitors and the complexity of the programme.

We have made a rule that no more than 15 people can comfortably gather round and discuss an individual drawing, and the archive space was designed with this limit in mind. We have recently completed a teaching space designed by Clancy Moore Architects that can accommodate up to 80 students. This is available for use mid-March to late October. This can work well for design workshops, informal lectures or eating lunch, while others are in the archive. With larger groups, we have also often collaborated with Hauser & Wirth Somerset, our close neighbour in Bruton: the party can be divided, and groups can spend time on both sites. (Please note, pre-booking with Hauser & Wirth directly is essential.)

Before visiting, we suggest that students explore drawingmatter.org and look at the following two links: Conjunction and Incongruity by Polly Gould and Niall Hobhouse’s interview on the Register Podcast, to learn more about the origins of Drawing Matter.

Tutors (or others) wishing to bring a group to the archive should register their interest here. For more information on visiting and to discuss alternative formats for group visits (including lectures in our new teaching space and off-site workshops at institutions or studios) please email matt@drawingmatter.org.

Students from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, recently visited us, and we documented the experience in a short film here.