Illustrations: The Latest Architecture and News

Striping away the unnecessary to reveal the soul of architecture's greatest works is the latest challenge Federico Babina has taken on. With 18 paintings, Babina has revisited the notorious works of Le Corbusier, Tadao Ando, MVRDV, Rem Koolhaas and many others to summarize in just "a few lines" their true essence.

"The intent is to display the volumes, shapes, and even style of iconic architecture through simple lines and geometry," says Babina. "The project is part of a study on the simplification and the identification of the basic elements for the recognition of buildings. The idea is to archive an almost abstract representation without losing the essence of the figurative representation."

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French artist and illustrator Vincent Mahé has shared his most recent work with us -- a series of illustrations made for a special edition of Telerama magazine that depicts the life of the renowned Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier. In just eight pages, the artist highlights the most relevant facts of this unforgettable architect's life. Expressed in green and pink tones, we can see key moments that have without a doubt shifted the course of contemporary architecture, with the extreme care and clarity that Mahé's work presents us.

View the eight illustrations after the break.

For his latest project, Federico Babina teamed up with architect Federico Ortiz Sanchez to imagine, illustrate and sculpt 12 “symbolic and symbiotic micro-architectures,” each representing a different component of a house and together making up the “DNA of the House.”

The project was inspired by the Fundamentals theme of the 2014 Venice Biennale, “but instead of dissecting a catalogue of components we composed a collection of images,” writes Babina. “We wanted to highlight the specific personality of each one of the artifacts we proposed, every single one uses its own set of symbols in order to address their different issues in this diverse compendium of spaces of the intimate.”

Learn more about the project and view the 12 illustrations after the break. 

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From 17th century Postmedieval English homes to the “McMansions" of the 90s, check out Pop Chart Lab's structured survey of 121 North American homes from the past 400 years. Sorted into seven major categories and 40 subdivisions, the comprehensive diagram highlights the morphology of homes throughout the US.

Each print is signed and numbered by the artists, much like the Brooklyn-based company's popular "Schematic of Structures" poster that features mankind's 90 greatest architectural achievements.

Through her project "Cities and Memory - the Architecture and the City" Architect Marta Vilarinho de Freitas has created a set of illustrations that focus on architecture and the fantasy worlds it can create. The project arose from her thesis on “Communicating Art” at the Superior Artística School in Porto, and seeks to tell stories of the “cities and the life that inhabits in each of them.”

View more images and a text from the architect after the break. 

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A competition proposal by Alexander Culler and Danny Travis, placed second in Blank Space's recent Fairy Tales competition, is now the subject of a Kickstarter campaign asking whether there is "a way to use architectural drawing to tell a story that was easy enough for everyone to understand?" The team behind the Beautifully Banal comic-zine are now seeking to transform their competition entry into a full-scale publication in order to "combine the intricacies of architectural drawing types with a form of story telling that allows those outside of the field to gain a new appreciation for the buildings and structures that occupy the world."

"Directors are like the architects of cinema," says Federico Babina, an Italian architect known for his imaginative architecture-inspired illustrations. In his latest, Babina envisions a fictional city of 27 houses inspired by film's most celebrated directors, including George Lucas, Charles Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders and many others.

"The architecture is like a scene from a movie where the story is the life, the script is dictated by the use of the building and where the actors are the residents. A labyrinth where all - characters, director, audience –are lost and found in the intensity of their emotions," Babina adds. 

Tour through the entire city, after the break. 

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With his latest series of illustrations, Federico Babina offers us "a journey into the universe of design" through 28 illustrations which use a composition of frames to tell stories around iconic designs. "I like to think of the objects that inhabit our homes as a silent audience, but active in our lives," explains Babina. "The objects themselves tell stories, not inanimate things but things that soak up the life that surrounds them."

Through the combination of so-called "timeless" designs with clear references to the times and styles that produced them, Babina tells the history of these iconic objects that we may take for granted today (with the occasional saucy human story thrown in for good measure).

See the entire set of ARCHIDESIGN illustrations after the break - and if you missed them, make sure to check out Federico Babina's previous illustration sets and his website.

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Canadian artist Steve McDonald has released "Fantastic Cities," an illustrated coloring book featuring 60 cities from around the world. From Paris to New York, Tokyo to Istanbul, the illustrations will take any architect or urban planner back to childhood times.

The book, with 48 full-view pages of real and imaginary places, is on sale Amazon and Chronicle Books. Take a look inside, after the break.

Take a virtual walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with these illustrations of the city's facades by graphic designer Avner Gicelter. “My aim is to capture the unique essence of the building's features in my illustrations, using a minimal set of graphic elements,” he explained. “After the building's illustration is done I choose a background color out of a palette and a typeface that will reflect what I refer to as a Tel Avivian atmosphere."

Gicelter first had the idea to capture the unique architecture in Tel Aviv’s city center when apartment hunting in 2013. “I got more interested in the building's facade than in the apartments we were looking at,” he said. Since then he has illustrated over 70 different buildings.

Check out some of Gicelter’s illustrations after the break and visit his website to learn more. His illustrations are also available for purchase on Etsy.

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UPDATE: Congratulations to winners Robert, Angelo, Nathaniel, Enasaveva, and Avi! We will be contacting you via email. 

When Italian architect Federico Babina released his Archibet set this past year, it was an instant hit; no surprise, considering Babina’s illustrations depict the styles of 26 famous architects, from Alvar Aalto to Zaha Hadid, in a clever way unlike anything else. Now, thanks to Babina and publisher Laurence King, five of our readers can win their very own Archibet set.

Official rules: Check out Babina’s complete Archibet set (here) and let us know your favorite “letter” in the comment section below. Five winners will be chosen at random from entries received between Monday, January 12th and Sunday, January 18th 11:59 EST. Anyone in the world is welcome to participate. One entry per person. ArchDaily will enforce verification and remove duplicated ones before choosing the winner.

Bonus: ArchDaily readers can purchase a copy of Archibet by Federico Babina at a discount of 30% when ordering from www.laurenceking.com. Enter the code ARCHIBET30 at the checkout.

Good luck! 

To celebrate the start of 2015, Xinran Ma, a New York-based architectural designer and illustrator, has created this brutalist-inspired greetings card. Based on his work illustrating over 50 of the classic projects of modernist and brutalist architecture, this card features pieces of these recognizable buildings, remixed and adapted to create a typeface.

Xinran says that the buildings he illustrates all have one unfortunate thing in common: "they are extremely attractive and inspiring to me," he says, but "ironically they have been somehow gradually forgotten." As a result, the illustrations he produces are not just a hobby, but part of an obligation he feels "to defend, memorize and deliver the classics that I believe are immortal." Xinran has shared 18 of these illustrations with ArchDaily to spread the word about these buildings; check them out after the break, and click on the images to find out more about each one.

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