Rudimentary architecture: Photo-graphic design methods
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Architecture and urban design (MPARC), MSc
Publicerad
2022
Författare
Kristinsdottir, Anna
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
PHOTO–GRAPHIC DESIGN METHODS
This thesis explores artistic and technological overlaps between architecture, photography,
and graphic design. It uses techniques from all three fields as a way to both analyze an
existing building stock and develop a particular design process that draws from this analysis.
The aim is to enrich architecture with ways of looking and of documenting as well as with
particular design sensibilities that take cues from photography and graphic design. My
interest in this topic is influenced by a trajectory of work that straddles these fields and by my
professional background as a photographer and graphic designer.
Graphic design, photography and architecture have a lot in common and create synergies
when they overlap in a supporting symbiosis with each other. As architect and theorist
Jesús Vassallo recently has noted, architecture and photography share an interest in certain
compositional and representational traits, including typology, frontality, and realism. This
is evidenced in the work of photographers such as Philip Schaerer or Bernd and Hilla
Becher, and in the work of architects such as MOS or De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. Spanning
both documentation and speculation, the thesis develops through observing, representing,
cataloging, and designing.
The thesis begins with a study of the architecture of Ringön, an old district in the former
industrial harbor of Gothenburg. The buildings of Ringön have for a century developed a
clear graphic sensibility due to the use of colorful industrial materials such as corrugated
sheet metal in different profiles and scales. Analyzing Ringön’s anonymous but expressive
architecture is akin to discovering and conceptualizing the undesigned - defining and framing
symmetries and playful compositions in the expression of the buildings created by accident in
the pursuit of optimal functionality. By making observations in this district, I use the collected
catalog to define the ingredients that make up Ringön’s character. The character of a place
can, in terminology gleaned from graphic design, be translated into a graphic identity or
design manual which becomes a framework and a compacted overview of core elements.
This manual is used as a design guide through the project.
The purpose of the collected observations is to develop a speculative design project based
on the catalog of features and techniques, placed on a vacant site in the heart of Ringön.
The design project aims to be a building proposal where the character will be in conversation
with Ringön’s existing spirit and the intent is to use previously used methods to translate and
extend the discoveries and findings I have gathered along the way.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Photography , Graphic methods , Character