Celebrating new books

Drawing Matter presents six titles published this summer to coincide with exhibitions in London, Berlin and Venice. Each publication centres on the drawing as a vital object, artefact, practice and expression of architecture.

Following the eponymous 2017 AA exhibition, Siza and Gowan: Housing and the City offers a comparative reading of the design process and housing projects of James Gowan and Álvaro Siza. And a new collection of beautiful architect–sketchbooks, Opening Lines I–IV, reveals the working processes of Siza, Tony Fretton, Níall McLaughlin and Adolfo Natalini through facsimile and conversation. Drawing Matter also celebrates the release of Line, Light, Locus by Elizabeth Hatz, a catalogue that takes a forensic view into the display of 133 drawings at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale.

Other titles related to Drawing Matter and works in the collection—Footnotes, backgrounds, sheds: The Drawing Matter Archive by Hugh Strange, Jordan Kauffman’s Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 (MIT Press) and Off Location: Drawings for the US Embassy Moscow by Tim Abrahams will also be available. Author’s copies of the newly-released Drawing Architecture (Phaidon) by Helen Thomas will be on view.

Drawing Matter has its home in a farmyard in a small valley in the West of England, alongside cows, sheep, tractors and a significant group of buildings by contemporary architects.

Assembled by Niall Hobhouse over the last 25 years, the collection comprises many thousand architectural drawings and models, ranging from the 16th to the 21st century, with a focus on the “thinking” drawing and its role in the process of design.

Drawing Matter Trust was formed to investigate the limits of architectural representation; it does this through looking at original material, regular exhibitions, symposia and other educational initiatives, publications, and related events—most recently, a production of Dido and Aeneas in the cowshed designed by Stephen Taylor Architects.