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

Abstract

The essay is a reflection on the production of images in the work of our practice, Dogma. Since the onset of our work, we were interested in architectural images as both explanations of architecture and real abstractions, and in developing a representation method that was consistent with the content of our design work. Critical of the realist character of the computer renderings and of its ideological underpinnings, we started producing our first digital collages in an analogical way for our first large-scale proposals of the early 2000s. In this work, avoiding the formal complexity of early digital architecture, we used images to abstract architecture, namely to reduce architecture to simple formal compositions of built masses. These early images avoided the typical effects of early computer renderings by using simple found textures or by imagining interventions as simple cut-outs of a given context picture. The technique of using found images and cutting out things in them led us to rediscover the pictorial dimension of images and to use paintings and art photography as source materials for our own representation work. In this period, we were particularly fascinated by the early work of Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, and in that of painters such as David Hockney, Peter Doig and Henri Rousseau. Since 2010, following a series of housing competitions, we started to become interested in domestic space and its potential for transformation. This interest unfolded in a long research by design trajectory, in which we have tried to further develop our representation technique in line with our design agenda. The images produced for this set of projects are based on a few common characteristics, such as the deployment of the central perspective as a tool to de-individuate the subject of our architecture, the avoidance of any stylistic or linguistic concerns, the deployment of simple and non-descriptive furniture, hinting to the possible uses of domestic space without imposing predetermined functions. Our essay articulates and reflects on the relationship between our design ideas and representation and our understanding of drawing as the place of mental creation and material expression.