Aerial Photography of Houses in Ecuador: Visualizing a Building From Above

Location: Quito, Ecuador
Year: 2016

Written by Belén Maiztegui | Translated by Nicolás Valencia
Published on August 09, 2021

Capturing aerial photographs allows raising awareness of a project feature usually complex to capture using traditional methods. Based on the technological opportunities offered by small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called drones, architecture photographers have begun to explore new ways of capturing a project in order to expose design decisions such as implantation, dialogue with the environment, or the relationship with nearby buildings.

Being able to convey the architectural relationship between a building and its context is something that has aroused the interest of architects even before digital photography was not yet available as a massive tool today is.

Commonly represented on drawings as “floor plan, this type of visualization allowed to explain information about the environment and, at the same time, give clues about the programmatic organization of the plan.

Can you decode some design strategies by viewing only the aerial photos of a project? Can you guess how the building is oriented according to the shadows cast by its volume? Where does it close and where does it open? How does it relate to the existing roads and buildings? How do you position yourself in front of the landscape? To illustrate with some examples, we present a selection of houses across Ecuador showcased through aerial photography taken by drones.