Architecture as Image Event

Verführungstechniken in der Architekturdarstellung
Symposium & book launch

16.00 lectures
4 books - 4 positions on architectural drawing

“fala 01”
(fala, 2017)
fala is a naïve architecture practice based in porto, led by filipe magalhães, ana luisa soares and ahmed belkhodja. established in 2013, the atelier works with methodic optimism on a wide range of projects, from territories to birdhouses. fala’s projects are a medley of formal languages, references, quotations, and themes, only regulated by an obsession for clarity; its architecture is both hedonic and postmodern, intuitive and rhetorical.

“Handbook of Tyranny”
(Theo Deutinger, Lars Müller Publishers, 2018)
Handbook of Tyranny portrays the routine cruelties of the twenty-first century through a series of detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations.
Every page of the book questions our current world of walls and fences, police tactics and prison cells, crowd control and refugee camps. The dry and factual style of storytelling through technical drawings is the graphic equivalent to bureaucratic rigidity born of laws and regulations. The level of detail depicted in the illustrations of the book mirror the repressive efforts taken by authorities around the globe.

“Pictures of the Floating Microcosm: New Representations of Japanese Architecture”
(Olivier Meystre , Park Books, 2017)
The drawings, pictures, and models produced by contemporary Japanese architects, which have become objects of fascination in the West, merit rational examination. This book undertakes a critique of the design tool and mediatisation techniques that have been employed by the main players on the Japanese architectural scene in the past twenty years.

“Cartography of Smallness
Learning from Japan - kleinmaßstäbliche Nachverdichtungsstrategien in Wien”
Bernadette Krejs & Andreas Kofler (Hrsg.), Abteilung Wohnbau und Entwerfen, TU Wien, 2018
The publication “Cartography of Smallness” depicts, through numerous architectural illustrations and drawings, strategies of small-scale densification in Vienna. Making use of a “Learning from Japan” method, it generated new housing perspectives and interpretations of “smallness” in Vienna. This ultimately also led to 13 projects, which propose innovative strategies and opportunities for ongoing housing questions.

18.00 panel discussion
Architecture as Image –
Verführungstechniken in der Architekturdarstellung
with: Filipe Magalhães and Ana Luisa Soares (fala), Olivier Meystre, Theo Deutinger, Bernadette Krejs and Andreas Kofler

Historically architecture and its representation must have had a not too remote hour of birth. Drawing, as a tool for either planning or documenting architecture, is both a necessity for executing a building or for transmitting the aesthetic and technical knowledge gathered during each attempt to perfection what – at the end of the day – is the construction of four walls and a roof. But, whenever architecture addresses an audience, these two domains merge and representation becomes a tool for seducing a client, a commission, other architects, etc.

With the ascension of the internet and the reformatting of architecture for this media, representation appears to have even grown in importance and increasingly hunts for new and rediscovered aesthetics. Whilst photorealistic renderings seem to still be a must to feed the hunger of developers and their investors, more creative artistic crossovers aliment the newsfeeds of ArchDaily or Dezeen, literally consuming all David Hockney or Edward Hopper paintings for their needs, paired with the pretending clarity of axonometric drawings and perspective sections.

In all these, a sort of chicken or the egg question emerges. Does representation already influence architecture during the design process? Would and can the adoption of a specific technique limit or open the range of potential outcomes? What are the elements and the intentions that construct such potential images aiming to analyse, explain, convince and seduce through the careful assembly of their content? The symposium “Architecture as Image” dedicates itself to these questions and, as the title suggest, forgets – at least for a few hours – the Vitruvian raison d’être of our profession.