A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Drawing Matter Extracts 2: Women Writing Architecture Edited by Helen Thomas Drawing Matter , 2021 Paperback | 16-1/2 x 11-3/4 (5-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches folded) | 44 pages | English | £10 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Drawing Matter Extracts 2: Women Writing Architecture is edited by Helen  Thomas and collects together 24 texts written by women in architectural  practice and connected disciplines. The anthology is published to  coincide with the launch of the Women Writing Architecture website , an annotated bibliography of writing about  architecture by women.  Women Writing Architecture includes texts by Helen Thomas, Sheila O’Donnell, Stephanie Macdonald, Philippa Lewis, Caroline Voet, Iris Moon, Desley Luscombe, Zoe Zenghelis, Mari Lending, Maria Conen, Deanna Petherbridge, Marie-José van Hee, Roz Barr, Asli Çiçek, Ana Araujo, Sarah Handelman, Emma Letizia Jones, Anahat Chandra, Emily Priest, Angharad Davies, Deepiga Kameswaran and Emerald Liu. Helen Thom...

Drawing Matter Extracts 1: Where to Begin? Niall Hobhouse, Matt Page (Editors) Drawing Matter , 2020 Paperback | 16-1/2 x 11-3/4 (5-1/2 x 11-3/4 inches folded) | 64 pages (all 3 volumes) | English | £6.50 (each), £15.00 (full set) PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Drawing Matter Extracts is a series of informal anthologies that address particular themes or problems in the process of design. Each combines drawings from the Drawing Matter Collection and elsewhere with newly commissioned texts, and others previously published on www.drawingmatter.org or found in the architectural library at Shatwell Farm. The first anthology in the series, ‘Where to Begin?’, presents a survey of architects’ starting points, and is published in three parts, spanning over five-hundred years of architectural practice. dDAB COMMENTARY : "Where to begin?," that is the question. It's not an easy question, I'll admit, be it in terms of tackling an architectural design, as I did back in the day...

Housing and the City: Álvaro Siza and James Gowan Ellis Woodman and Manuel Montenegro with Tony Fretton Drawing Matter , 2018 Paperback | 9-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches | 72 pages | 71 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9780995630932 | £16.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : As Ellis Woodman points out in his Introduction to this extensively illustrated discussion of the housing projects of Álvaro Siza and James Gowan, this publication frames an encounter between the work of two men who might be considered an unlikely pairing. However, both men were engaged in critical response to the tenets of the Athens Charter that they sought to resolve in their low-cost housing experiments of the 1960s and 70s. The implications of the different social, political and economic contexts in which they enacted this difficult task makes the juxtaposition of their work a fascinating and fruitful process of discovery. Reflecting the spatial disposition of the Housing and the City exhibition held at the Architectural...

Opening Lines I – IV Tina di Carlo (Editor) Drawing Matter , 2018 Paperback | 7-3/4 x 11-1/2 inches | 592 pages in four volumes | English | £100.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : This series of books is generated, very simply, from conversations with architects sitting again in front of their old sketchbooks. Often, he or she may not have opened them for many years; we found them ready to speak now quite as unselfconsciously as they had been drawing decades before. The Drawing Matter collection has a focus on material of this kind, and we have long recognized that sketchbooks are generally the most personal – and the least casually accessible – medium for the production of architectural thinking. To understand the collection better, we have tried here to invent an instrument in which the ideas of the architect, as expressed in the sketchbook and through the spoken word, might once again be synchronized. The publication of the four volumes is timed to coincide with an exhibition of t...

Architecture through Drawing Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas, Niall Hobhouse (Editors) Lund Humphries , November 2019 Hardcover | 9-1/2 x 12 inches | 240 pages | 100 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-1848223776 | $99.99 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Architecture through Drawing examines how drawing – as both action and object – encapsulates complex ideas relating to culture, technology, space and the built environment. Bringing together an array of beautiful and rarely seen drawings dating from the sixteenth century to the present day, all representing different geographical locations, techniques, methodologies and purposes, the book defines a new field for the subject of the drawing in architecture. It reveals the motives for architectural drawing beyond the requirement to document the processes that underpin the realisation of the architectural object. This book asks, fundamentally, whether drawings can illuminate new interpretations of architectural experimentation. Examples r...

Startha Éagsula / Alternative Histories Sarah Handelman (Editor) Drawing Matter /Irish Architectural Archive, 2020 Paperback | 6-1/4 x 9-1/2 inches | 64 pages | English (foreword also in Gaelic) | ISBN: 978-1916152212 | £14.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : First presented in London in 2019, Alternative Histories invited  85 practices in the UK and Europe to respond to archival drawings held in the collection of Drawing Matter with models of their own. For the occasion of the show’s presentation at the Irish Architectural Archive in Dublin, the curators invited nine additional Irish or Irish-based architectural practices to join the original five. This catalogue brings together the voices and processes of these 14 participants, providing an opportunity to reflect and to consider contemporary Irish architecture in contexts at once European and historical. dDAB COMMENTARY : The last of the three legs of the traveling exhibition Alternative Histories opened on December 3rd at the I...

Alternative Histories Jantje Engels, Marius Grootveld (Curators); Thomas Adank, Guus Kaandorp (Photographers) Drawing Matter , 2019 Paperback | 9-1/4 x 11-3/4 inches | 204 pages | English | ISBN: 978-1916152205 | £26.00 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Acknowledging that architecture is a corpus of inherited ideas, Alternative Histories began with a question: could a contemporary architect, with their own references, make a model that would respond to a drawing from the past? This book collects the 85 models produced by the same number of practices alongside the architectural drawings that prompted them, all of which are held in the UK-based archive of Drawing Matter. Taken as a whole, the responses challenge the facile understanding of concepts of reference, history or influence as drivers of contemporary architectural thinking. From methods to materials, the project opens up not only new ways of looking at the past, but also a series of conversations about how architects today shap...