D - EUW: The Image Before for the Building

Since ancient times, the production of architecture in the form of buildings has required a project: a set of instructions comprising texts, drawings, and scale models. While technical drawings, such as plans and sections, primarily concern the planning and control of the building process, images have traditionally been used to persuade patrons, and later clients, of the validity of a proposed building. In contrast to the abstraction of technical drawings, architectural images tend to render buildings realistically. As such, they have largely been admired for stimulating the patrons’ and people’s imagination, but also criticized for their rhetorical excess and for creating deceptive representations of the processes through which architecture is both made and experienced. Yet, if images are to address architecture as it should look once built, they must also retain their status as images of architecture: two-dimensional representations that anticipate or speculate upon built form rather than reproduce its actual experience. Understanding the architectural image as something necessary for, yet distinct from, the experience of architecture, this seminar focuses on the production of architectural images by rediscovering their pictorial dimension—namely, their artificiality as two-dimensional artefacts, in contrast to their apparent three-dimensional illusionism. The seminar takes the form of an intensive, one-week hands-on workshop, held at the end of the semester. During the workshop, students will develop two architectural images of one project of choice. Combining theoretical and practical notions which will be presented in the kick-off meeting, students will engage with relevant references and familiarize themselves with digital tools and techniques to produce architectural images. The workshop will conclude with a small exhibition of the images produced. Since ancient times, the production of architecture in the form of buildings has required a project: a set of instructions comprising texts, drawings, and scale models. While technical drawings, such as plans and sections, primarily concern the planning and control of the building process, images have traditionally been used to persuade patrons, and later clients, of the validity of a proposed building. In contrast to the abstraction of technical drawings, architectural images tend to render buildings realistically. As such, they have largely been admired for stimulating the patrons’ and people’s imagination, but also criticized for their rhetorical excess and for creating deceptive representations of the processes through which architecture is both made and experienced. Yet, if images are to address architecture as it should look once built, they must also retain their status as images of architecture: two-dimensional representations that anticipate or speculate upon built form rather than reproduce its actual experience. Understanding the architectural image as something necessary for, yet distinct from, the experience of architecture, this seminar focuses on the production of architectural images by rediscovering their pictorial dimension—namely, their artificiality as two-dimensional artefacts, in contrast to their apparent three-dimensional illusionism. The seminar takes the form of an intensive, one-week hands-on workshop, held at the end of the semester. During the workshop, students will develop two architectural images of one project of choice. Combining theoretical and practical notions which will be presented in the kick-off meeting, students will engage with relevant references and familiarize themselves with digital tools and techniques to produce architectural images. The workshop will conclude with a small exhibition of the images produced.