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The Köln Museum: Imagery and Imaging in the Architecture of James Stirling

Fabio Colonnese — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The 1970s museum projects of James Stirling provide the opportunity to explore a design process intended to design a building as a combination of fragments that quote historical buildings or typologies along a route. While the collection of spaces of the unbuilt museum for Cologne indirectly reveals Stirling’s own architectural imagery almost in a chronological sense, the drawings produced to present the competition entry in 1974 are anything but explicit and ask the reader to collaborate to decipher the architectural contents. This apparent contradiction is here analyzed and discussed in the key provided by Stirling’s peculiar interest in drawing, his office organization, and the agency Leon Krier had in it while preparing the drawings for the first monograph on the Scottish architect.

Drawing Architecture of the Italian Economic Miracle: The Sketches of Vico Magistretti

Salvatore Damiano — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

How was architecture drawn in Italy during the years of the economic boom?
The case of Vico Magistretti, a born in Milan architect and pupil of Ernesto Nathan Rogers, as well as a designer of international renown, could provide insight into the evolution of ways of representing architecture, especially during the conceptual stages of the project. The critical re-reading of a selection of six design sketches, dating from the period between the beginning of the 1950s and the end of the 1960s, outlines a cognitive and communicative path of architectural values. But drawing is also a moment of verification of architecture’s perceptive, relational, and spatial datum, which Magistretti would decline throughout his long career convincingly and constantly in one way to achieve progressively different results.

Com(ic)onic: Architecture in the Comics

Michela De Domenico, Paola Raffa, Fabio Testaì — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The city and architecture are often the protagonists of drawn narratives in which spatial connotation wants to be an element of contextualization and recognizability, but also of externalization of existential places. They appear in comics reshaped on real and fantastic lifestyles that combine narrative invention and architectural representation. The research takes into consideration three large stylistic/expressive groupings of comics, to then carry out a parallel analysis of three large cities, coinciding with the same contexts of origin of the comics. To identify new scenarios in the field of architectural representation and visual communication.
In the narrative layout of comics, architecture assumes the role of iconic figure, whose meaning is expressed through the separation and cohesion of the sign and refers to a place understood as a defined space-time element.

The Production of Architectural Imagery Via Exhibitions: Three Scholars Show Their Work At Ar/Ge Kunst, Bolzano

Roberto Gigliotti — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Both the so-called academic research and the field research related to the production of an exhibition might have a relevant influence not only on the discourse around architecture but also on the production of an architectural imagery and on architecture itself. Starting from the position of the three scholars/artists/architects that conducted their research at ar/ge kunst in Bolzano –on the border between speculative and spatial production– between 2016 and 2018, the aim of this paper is to investigate their proposals in order to bring to light the undeniable relationship between academic assumptions and explorations concerned with the production of an architectural imagery via an exhibition.

Tracing Zeitgeist: The Cyberflâneur and Their Smartphone

Pieter Greyvensteyn — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This essay investigates the way in which architecture is communicated in the postdigital era. Digital collages, created from photographs taken by so-called cyberflâneurs with their smartphones and reinterpreted through current smartphone applications, were the architectural representations under the spotlight. Generation Z architecture students were assigned the role of the cyberflâneur; a flâneur being defined as someone experiencing urban space on their own terms, 'cyber' referring to the flâneur’s instrument, the smartphone.
Drawing and design are explored through the triad of hand, mind and smartphone. The visual artefacts being communicated are buildings in central Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa and in Maputo, Mozambique, from a list based on a compact urban typology built either 50- or 100-year-ago. The imagery on the screen of the smartphone becomes the lens through which we experience reality. The quality and complexity of the digital collages are telling of our zeitgeist; patterns and algorithms can be traced. Technology provide us with the tools to connect us to a synchrony that is the pulse of global culture. The graphic analysis of the visual material produced by the cyberflâneurs propagates zeitgeist as a major contributor to architectural expression by tracing a universal synchronicity.

The Architectural Illustrator: A Key Figure in Visual Communication

Gaia Leandri — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

In contemporary architectural practice a key role in visual communication is performed by the illustrator. This professional shares the expertise of the architect, master of a strictly technical-engineering language, and the artist in the broadest sense of the term. For an architect drawing is a means, for the illustrator an end in itself. As a mediator between the designer and the general public, he must be able to deeply understand the architect’s thoughts, translate his ideas into images and convey the correct message to the audience. Sometimes visual messages, though obvious to the illustrator, can be unclear for the observer and generate misleading responses.
In these cases the type of image has great importance being a sort of language more or less understandable. This paper reports on a survey that was created in order to assess some of the fundamental elements that characterize the visual products. It was carried out at the Department of Architecture and Design, University of Genoa, and its results support the thesis that the architect’s idea and creative spirit can best be conveyed by a hand drawn image, whether traditionally or digitally executed, rather than a computer-generated image such as a photorealistic render.

Wise Designs from Uncertain Handwriting and New Communications

Francesco Maggio, Alessia Garozzo — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The architecture of the 20th century has been largely affected by changes in the field of technology. In particular, the evolution of digital representation has led to new visions of contemporary architectural space. Expressive freedoms, which in the pre-digital era stemmed from visionary approaches, now become feasible thanks to modern modelling technologies.
They determine a mutation of working processes and creative elaboration, proving to be more than just a mechanical tool without theoretical-speculative implications. Transformation of reality into updatable and modifiable data flows leads towards a new weltanschauung, characterised by the modern paradigms of precariousness and flexibility. Digital world, based on processing of algorithms and information, becomes a link between art and mathematics. The theoretical universe based on the fourth dimension and non-euclidean geometries, which had produced interesting artistic effects in the avantgarde movements of the 20th century, now finds a means of expression in the field of architecture.
The paper explores the assumptions of contemporary architectural expressions and the implications that digital technologies have had on changes in architecture since the 1990s: from the fluid and deconstructed shapes linked to multidimensional experiments to the most recent experiences, placed at the border between art and architecture, that are experimenting with the transfer of digital language into the real world.

The Digital Paradigm in Contemporary Architecture

Domenico Mediati — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The architecture of the 20th century has been largely affected by changes in the field of technology. In particular, the evolution of digital representation has led to new visions of contemporary architectural space. Expressive freedoms, which in the pre-digital era stemmed from visionary approaches, now become feasible thanks to modern modelling technologies. They determine a mutation of working processes and creative elaboration, proving to be more than just a mechanical tool without theoretical-speculative implications. Transformation of reality into updatable and modifiable data flows leads towards a new weltanschauung, characterised by the modern paradigms of precariousness and flexibility.
Digital world, based on processing of algorithms and information, becomes a link between art and mathematics. The theoretical universe based on the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries, which had produced interesting artistic effects in the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, now finds a means of expression in the field of architecture.
The paper explores implications that digital technologies have had on mutations of contemporary architecture: from the fluid and deconstructed shapes linked to multidimensional experiments to the most recent experiences, placed at the border between art and architecture, that are experimenting with the transfer of digital language into the real world.

Visualizing Change in Radical Cities and Power of Imagery in Urban Transformation

Asma Mehan — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Cities have consistently served as fertile grounds for the emergence and growth of radical ideas, political transformations, and social movements, with urban landscapes nurturing visionary concepts, idealism, and revolutionary ideologies. This research delves into the captivating world of radical cities, exploring the power of image and visual narratives to communicate and comprehend urban activism within diverse contexts. By analyzing various case studies and student works, we aim to create, study, and reimagine vivid portrayals of urban activism, radical urbanism, and future socio-spatial developments. The focus lies on developing innovative visual modalities and collaborative critical pedagogical approaches that engage with the complexities of radical cities across North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and beyond. In this study, we explore the potential of image and visual narratives to decode and understand pivotal societal transitions in radical cities. By employing imaginative and critical pedagogy, we aspire to foster a more profound comprehension of urban activism and its impact on shaping the cities of the future.

The Rethoric of Space Representation: From Drawing Heritage to Visual Computing

Michela Rossi, Luca Armellino — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Digital technology connects people in digital space focusing the attention on images, which create and introduce you into artificial spaces. The development of digital technology offers the possibility of living immersive experiences in suitable activities to improve real skills in digital ‘room’. That means the possibility of exploring otherwise impossible space, opening to new applications of visual arts. Digital reality explores imaginary worlds through senses, first of all the sight. Hybrid reality becomes actual through visual images. Because of that the imaging requires first of all the management of visual space. Perspective makes believable the space visualization, and the drawing tradition becomes the main reference to the design of suitable space, as well in the rhetoric of impossible world.
The architectural drawing enhances the perspective by light and shadow, more than color. Besides the unreal architecture, the graphic art shows interesting representations of abstract mathematical spaces, referred to the concepts of Not Euclidean Geometry.
Some considerations open a further research comparing the drawing tradition with last trends in contemporary imagery,
starting with Utopia’s imaginary architecture. Today images confirm the role of the perspective, thus the relationship between the eye and the room.

Wandering Architecture Through the Looking Glass of Digital Representation: An Expeditious Teaching Experience in Understanding and Modelling Modern Architecture

Anna Sanseverino, Victoria Ferraris, Carla Ferreyra — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The present work focuses on an expeditious teaching experience of Architecture and 3D modelling aimed at the ‘Architectural Drawing II’ and ‘Computer Graphics’ students of the Building Engineering-Architecture Degree Programme of the University of Salerno, Italy.
The students, involved in the ‘Italy-South Africa Joint Research Programme, ISARP 2018-2020 – A Social e spatial investigation at the Moxomatsi village, Mpumalanga’ (SSIMM), were supported in the digital reconstruction of three iconic examples of modern architecture located in South America and South Africa, i.e., the Curutchet House (La Plata, Argentina), the Coromandel Estate Manor House (Mpumalanga, South Africa) and the Jooste House (Pretoria, South Africa).
Through an Alice-in-wonderland-type of voyage, they had the chance to first analyse the complex inner space of these architectural assets that both emerge from and fade into the landscape and then propose their own interpretation through rendered and post-processed imagery.

Editorial

Alessandro Luigini — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Visual Research Methods to Improve Teaching

Giancarlo Gola — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper presents an exploratory examination of video-mediated classroom interaction in School and University settings, a modality of teaching and learning which has recently experienced a rapid growth as a consequence of the COVID-19 emergency. Based on a corpus of audio and video recorded virtual classes, we analyze how instructors and students cope with the challenges of not being physically copresent and lacking direct visual contact in the virtual enviroment, and discuss how fundamental mechanisms of face-to-face classroom interaction –participants’ mutual orientation in the opening phase, speakers’ identification and recognition, as well as instructors’ actions like comprehension checks, solicitations for questions/comments, questions and evaluations– are partially modified in the virtual environment, making it more complex, for instructors, to enhance students’ active participation. Final considerations are devoted to the possible implications of these preliminary findings.

Persistences: Analysis of the Image of Gdańsk and Its Cultural Identity Through Survey Processes and Digital Architectural Representation

Francesca Picchio, Sandro Parrinello, Justyna Borucka, Jacub Szczepański — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The aim of the research was to analyse the historical legacy/heritage of the city of Gdańsk in order to characterise the narrative tools which can be used to promote the cultural identity of the urban landscape. The main focus was on the city’s defence system – a cultural route that is spatially limited to a relatively small area, but temporally spanning almost a millennium. The fortifications demarcate a spatial boundary, limiting the urban layout, which has remained distinguishable over the centuries, however changing its image. The research activities have been carried out by a multidisciplinary group of scholars participating in the H2020 PROMETHEUS European project aimed at developing innovative methodologies for digitising architecture with the integration of multidisciplinary data and information models, leading to specialised figures capable of operating on heritage built assets. The image of the city and the urban landscape is transforming in an attempt to strengthen its historical identity. In each century, new architectural and formal models are introduced, which become integrated with the structural characteristics of the urban layout, altering the urban space. Today, in the digital age, it is becoming strategic not only to convert architecture and its models, but also to make the urban image more explicit, trying to translate the invariants of the landscape into the 3D digital databases.