Marienbad, Proposal for the Hellenikon Metropolitan Park. Athens, Greece. 2003 (Dogma with Elia Zenghelis)

Paint a Vulgar Picture
On the Relationship between Images
and Projects in Our Work

by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara

Since ancient times, the production of architecture in the form of buildings has required a project. A project is a set of instructions that includes texts, drawings, and scale models. This body of work can be defined as the representation of architecture. Drawing architecture before building became especially necessary with the rise of monumental architecture, which required the careful planning of large amounts of material and human resources. The importance of representation is thus strictly related to the conditions of architectural production in terms of its material and economic feasibility. With the rise of the architect as a distinct professional figure from the builder, the representation of architecture in the form of drawings also became the place, parallel to the text, for intellectual speculation about architecture. Nonetheless, the intellectual status of architectural drawing should not be idealised, since such autonomy was primarily the result of the separation between intellectual and manual labour involved in the production of architecture. Indeed, the very idea of ‘disegno’ a term in which the mental creation process and its material expression overlap became the mark through which the architect elevated its status and downgraded the role of the builder, who was thus reduced to the strict execution of the architect’s drawn instructions.

The controversy surrounding architectural drawing as both an instrument of control and a means of intellectual invention is even more pronounced with images of architecture. While technical drawing (plan, section and elevation) is related to the planning and control of the building process, images have traditionally been used to persuade clients about the validity of a proposed building. Contrary to the abstraction of the technical drawing, images tend to render architecture realistically. As such, images of architecture have been often stigmatised as a very problematic medium because of their surplus rhetoric and their deception about the real process of both making and experiencing architecture. Architects themselves have often harshly criticised images in the forms of perspective drawings because of their lack of measurability. Nevertheless, unlike technical drawings, images such as perspective renderings make architecture, with its spatial and material character, more accessible to a wider audience. While not sufficient, images are still necessary for the communication of not yet realised architecture.

This does not imply that representation is a way to bypass the moment of building. On the contrary, images of architecture can and indeed should address architecture as built form, but they should retain their status of images of architecture, i.e., anticipations of or speculations about built form by means of a two-dimensional pictorial representation. No image of architecture can replace the experience of built architecture or shorten the complex journey between the initial idea of the building and its final material realisation. Yet, whether in the form of drawn pictures or photographs of real buildings, images are an essential and indeed inescapable aspect of our knowledge and experience of architecture. It was precisely by keeping in mind this paradox about images as necessary for, yet distinct from the experience of the built form, that we developed our method of architectural representation and especially our own way of producing images for our own architectural projects. Our intention was to develop a representation method in which images were clear explanations of the architecture and at the same time real abstractions.

Text available at El Croquis 208 Dogma 2002 2021, print and digital edition.