Starting this month, ArchDaily will introduce monthly themes. Our editors and curators will align their efforts to go deeper into topics we find relevant in today’s architectural discourse, presenting new articles, projects, collaborations, and submissions by our readers. This month we will begin with Architectural Representation.
What started as a ground cut to represent buildings as a 2D maze or the flat representation of styles on an elevation, later evolved into the axonometric representations of battlefields and fortresses for military use, and since then into a diverse variety of views, formats and techniques that go beyond the mere representation of a volume for its construction.
Since then, Architectural Representation has become a conveyor of ideas. The ideal man of Modernism to the utopias of Archigram, it has helped architects synthesize their message and deliver it across different formats and mediums. The depth of a perspective section, the lighting through a render, or the textures on a collage, a quick sketch on an iPad, an Instagram story or on a VR headset.
The state of drafting technology has influenced the relationship between representation and the building, from the parallel board to the early days of CAD/CAM, then BIM and now AR/VR. A relationship that sometimes is the “egg or chicken”, a challenge between tool and idea.
Today, the Internet as a medium offers an enhanced way to represent these ideas, and we have seen how diagrams and animated GIFs are able to expand the understanding of a building, or even how immersive 360º videos start to virtually transmit the “experience” of a building, as seen in our ArchDaily Experience project.
From the renaissance of the collage in the digital era to the expanded world of Augmented Reality, we will explore the state of Architectural Representation today and beyond in our first monthly theme.
If you’d like to submit content related to this theme, just send us a message.
