While using technical drawings, Zema Vieira makes architectural illustrations by using only AutoCAD without any further techniques. Her body of work became a project called “Fachada Frontal” or "Front Facade." In it, the artist depicts buildings from cities around the world, with a particular focus on Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Check out below the illustrations made by the artist.
"The project came about through an admiration for the way that architectural designs use to be represented. Not just the buildings, but the project themselves relied on a wealth of detail and an artistic sensibility that I believe would be impossible to recreate with the coldness of technical drawing tools used today, particularly CAD software. That’s where it came from, a desire to try."
"Facades especially caught my attention - an architect always plays with shadows to highlight volume, a technique now replaced by using different line thicknesses. The illustrations in Fachada Frontal, with maybe one or two exceptions, are always elevations, drawings without vanishing points, the same way they would be in technical drawings."
"Choosing which buildings to do was partly based on personal taste, but also involves practical issues. A major feature of the piece is the representation of each detail of the building, which makes a trip to the place for a photographic survey a fundamental step in the process. This visit also helps in understanding the object and its relationship with the urban landscape that surrounds it, and this is often reflected in designs that include this context."
Learn more about Fachada Frontal here or follow the project on Instagram or Facebook.
