Archinect - News

Editor's Picks #437

2015-12-16T11:51:00-05:00

Nicholas Korody penned a double review; of 'The Geological Imagination' and 'The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform'. He finds "The two books also help illuminate some of the difficulties in perceiving climate change, while offering some potentials for movement" and goes on to reference "enmeshment", systems thinking and dark ecology.

Plus, Robert Urquhart took stock of how The Bartlett and the Architectural Association are "bringing emerging technologies into the UK's architecture education".

News
Denise Scott Brown, along with her husband Robert Venturi, have won the 2016 AIA Gold Medal. Snubbed of the 1991 Pritzker Prize when Venturi was named as the only laureate, Scott Brown is the second female recipient of the Gold Medal.

In honor of the happy and historic occasion, Denise Scott Brown appeared on Archinect Sessions #45.

To DWLindeman it "is splendid good news, and a long overdue award...Robert Venturi was right to say to the AIA ‘not without Denise.’ This is also a very significan...

Architecture in the age of photoshop

2015-12-07T14:00:00-05:00

Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image?

In his column, Kamin scrutinizes the recent awarding of an honor award to El Centro, a building designed by Juan Moreno, by the Chicago branch of the AIA. Apparently, the architects provided the jurors with a photoshopped image of the building, notably erasing the clunky air circulation machines that crowd its roof and disturb its silhouette. With its regional awards, the AIA, unlike the Pritzker and other awards, does not mandate in situ inspection by jurors – or at least, up to now.

Architectural Photography without Architecture

2013-05-13T13:44:00-04:00

Slowly it dawned on me that this was not a photograph of a real building but a total digital fabrication. I was shocked, not in a moralistic way but, rather, with amazement at the masterful deception and amused pique at being fooled.

The technologies of representing architecture have advanced steadily over the years, from drawing to photography to digital rendering — and have lately taken a new leap.

On Places, Belmont Freeman argues, "the crafts of architectural rendering and photography have now merged into a common activity of digital image-making — so completely that one can conceive a work of architecture and produce a 'photograph' of it without having to go through the expensive, tedious and corrupting intermediate step of actually building the building. Welcome to the world of architectural photography without architecture."

He discusses the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibitions "After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age" and "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop"; the MoMA exhibition "9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design," and recent books of photography by Frédéric Chauban and Ezra Stoller.

...