Illustrations: The Latest Architecture and News

“Immersed in reading a book it feels like [being] inside an architecture, a metaphysical space surrounded by the words,” says Federico Babina, discussing his latest series of illustrations, ARCHIWRITER. In the new series of 27 drawings, the illustrator has created “portraits” of authors by personifying their writing styles, periods, and locations as built environments made from architectural elements and words. Heightening this sense of individuality, Babina states that the resultant portraits can be “fluctuating, vernacular, itinerant, ephemeral, concentric, labyrinthine, surrealist, oneiric, and futuristic.”

"I always liked play as a form of learning; toys are often a prelude to serious ideas," says Federico Babina about his latest series of illustrations, titled ARCHICARDS. "The game can also be a thought experiment. I'm interested in playing with architecture's seriousness and illustration's lightheartedness."

Babina's illustrations turn 12 of the architecture world's most recognizable faces into card-game caricatures, accompanied by the designs and symbols that most characterize their design style. Whether it's the dislocated planes of Mies van der Rohe (a Jack), Queen Zaha Hadid's jagged curves, or the modulor man that accompanies Le Corbusier - who is, of course, a king - Babina's playing cards are loaded with design references. They might indeed have some educational value, but they are mostly, as Babina points out, for "serious fun."

Read on to see the full set of 12 illustrations.

André Chiote’s newest series of illustrations focuses on the unique architectural characteristics of modern and contemporary world libraries. Using the building facades as a starting point, Chiote turns the complex exterior geometries and shadows into more minimalist representations of facilities that include: OMA’s Seattle Public Library, Scmidt Hammer Lassen’s University of Aberdeen New Library, and Dominique Perrault’s National Library of France.

“Libraries,” says Chiote, “Are houses of books. And newspapers. And magazines. And music. And movies. The entire world connected, where we are with ourselves and with others. They are our memories and our legacy. The reference of knowledge and leisure but also urbanity. Libraries are the house where we must always return.”

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What would some of our favorite buildings do if they could stand up and walk around? From the Leadenhall building to the Petronas Towers and One Central Park, designer and illustrator Michael William Lester has taken 20 architectural landmarks from around the world and brought them to life in a series of animated GIFs.

“Good architecture interacts with its surroundings,” writes Lester on his website. “It gives off energy, sparks interaction and pulls so much life in that the building itself lives and breaths.”

Petterson Dantas was born in Caicó, Brazil and has lived in Natal for 17 years. An architect and urban planner, he graduated from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. His series "Ode to Oscar" illustrates important works of Oscar Niemeyer, depicting the contrasts and the beauty of the buildings designed by Brazil's most famous architect.

Read the description of the project and see the illustrations below.

Artist Maycon Prasniewski has developed a series of illustrated posters featuring historic and cultural sites in Curitiba, Brazil. Important buildings in the city, such as the Oscar Niemeyer museum, the Wire Opera House, the Free University of the Environment (Unilivre), and the Botanical Garden are represented alongside other landmarks.

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View the illustrations after the break. 

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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An architectural “Paraidolia,” Federico Babina has uncaged the ARCHIZOO. Recalling images from his childhood, Babina has imagined a creative series of zoo animals rendered in familiar architectural forms.

“When I was a child I wanted to be an architect and now that I'm an architect I would like sometimes go back to my childhood,” says Babina. “Our mind is capable of collecting, record and store millions of images. One thing that always interests me is the association that we can do between these images.”

View the ARCHIZOO, after the break. 

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Federico Babina has released ARCHINOWHERE, a “series of illustrations that represent a parallel universe where past, present and future intertwine” to present a fantastical collection of “realistic yet unreal” architectural visions. The playful graphic, as Babina describes, “maintains a balance between illustrated architecture and an architectonical illustration” to relay imagined stories built on a foundation of contemporary ideals.

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