Fantastic Architecture: Illustrations By Bruna Canepa

Written by Romullo Baratto
Published on January 16, 2016

Architect, illustrator and cofounder of the Miniatura project, Bruna Canepa has shared with us a stunning collection of her illustrations and collages, which offer a fresh gaze onto one of architecture’s most common tools: the drawing. Beyond depicting examples of unreal architecture, her works present architecture that replaces firmitas, utilitas and venustas for complexity, wonder and irony.

From extrusions and explosions of familiar typologies to surreal and sterile atmospheres of empty spaces, we suggest three subcategories to frame Bruna’s illustrations as shown below: Houses, Cubics, and Displacements.

HOUSES

Experimentations on the typology of the dwelling; the house in its more trivial archetype is decomposed, exploded and rearranged through the tensions created by colored surfaces and volumes that cross, cut and break the ensemble.

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CUBICS

Formal experimentations based on extrusions, explosions and intersections of axes and planes, ‘cubic’ illustrations echo an architecture of diagrams that resemble – for their blatant plastic (despite not operational) similarities – Peter Eisenman’s House VI.

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DISPLACEMENTS

Perhaps Canepa’s most interesting illustrations are gathered in this group, in which every bond with reality is abandoned to make room for a set of scales, illusions and displacements that create architecture, which is ultimately surreal. Mountains on rooftops, exaggeratedly vertical buildings, and spaces that are reinterpreted through scale, are examples of this fantastic architecture that simultaneously arouses feelings of estrangement and attraction.