To avoid hyperrealistic renderings we have witnessed the emergence of other options for architectural representation which seduce the viewer, not for their overwhelming resemblance to reality but rather the opposite, its resemblance to everyday life's textures presented through unpretentious drawings inspired by collage, watercolor, and painting. Digital collage and other similar representation tools have gained more popularity when discussing how architecture can be communicated.
For the past two years, we have found ourselves wanting to highlight what is the foundation of architectural practice: the architectural drawing. We realized that even after almost a decade of publishing the best projects from around the world, we should take on the task of singling out the exceptional cases of representation, taking into account all varieties and species of drawings. Following up on the criteria used in the previous edition, all the architectural drawings we have selected this year have a sensitive expression— whether it be artistic, technical or conceptual—and they all aim to express and explain the respective project using simplicity, detail, textures, 3D and color as main tools.
Below you will see the selection of drawings arranged under eight categories: Architectural Drawings, Axonometrics, Context, Diagrams, Sketches, Animated Gifs, Details and Other Techniques.
The old adage "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" (it's stupid etc.), loses some of its impact when architecture becomes the backdrop for both music, and dancing. Ever since video killed the radio star, famous houses, quirky spaces, and history's great buildings have provided beautiful, unique and dramatic settings for music videos of all types. So which of 2017s music videos have capitalized on the wonderful world of architecture?
Thespaces.com have compiled a list of the best music videos for architecture lovers for 2017. Here are a few of our favorites and a few additional videos we think deserve a mention.
From New York to Rome, London to Cape Town and beyond, these city mash-ups blend distinct architecture and attractions to create truly unique imagined destinations. Expedia recently launched a series of campaigns that would inspire travelers by showcasing destinations from different perspectives and unique angles. They took 14 famous cities and combined their architectural DNA into 7 unique hybrid, mash-up cities.
Despite the insistence of some, vinyl records haven’t undergone a resurgence because of their supposed superior sound quality. Instead, the impractical medium remains cherished for its quirk and ambiguity. As of late, the collage has made a has made a comeback as a representational strategy for the very same reason, sparking a recent debate around the potential emergence of "post-digital drawing."
Intentionally fantastical compilations empower architects to create clear narratives to supplement their work. In response to this growing popularity, a number of websites have popped up to bolster the trend. Image hosting hub ARTCUTOUT is a curated collection of meticulously detailed, public domain .PNGs nabbed from works of art that were “mostly created several centuries ago by European painters and cartographers.” Serving as a something akin to a “post-digital” version of famed render hub SKALGUBBAR, ARTCUTOUT has the potential to be a go-to resource for the next wave of designers.
“An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few moments or a few centuries. Every image embodies a way of seeing.” - John Berger / 1972 / Ways of seeing
Digital tools have given architecture the ability to manipulate information, allowing architects to interact with existing information and reshape it in a different way according to the author’s ideals or thoughts about architecture.
Representation becomes a project itself; it is a graphic manifesto of what the author wants to deliver, a critical vision of a design intervention in a particular context.
In this path, collage has become an active tool to facilitate the reproduction of multi-layered atmospheres made by the curated assemblage of different forms to create a complex stage for an architectural idea.
A collage engages all senses to define the experience of a space. The symbolic and tactical associations between fragments of images provide a way to understand all the stories behind a space, transgressing the limits of perception to reach an intuitive process that exhibits the atmosphere of a project.
Here we introduce 12 architecture offices that describe atmospheres by using complex collage compositions to express social, cultural and political environments for their designs.
Sweden based visual artist, Anastasia Savinova, has created a series of collages that seek to capture the spirit of cities. Titled “Genius Loci,” her collages form a big house that is composed of many buildings characteristic of each city, visualizing the way of life, the atmosphere, and the feeling of each place. Photographs of architecture are the foundational components of her art work, representing the feeling as a whole.
