The art and artifice of architectural visualisation: does a picture tell a thousand words?

摘要

Architects depend on images to visualise their designs. In this way it is the language of an architect. As written language has evolved over time, so too have the methods of architectural visualisation from paintings and hand drawings to photography and CAD and everything in between. Architectural imagery is a process that begins with the conception of an idea for a building and continues to live beyond the life of the final physical form. But the image is never more than a snapshot in time constructed with a particular audience in mind. Within its life, a piece of architecture will be rewritten hundreds of times and each time will convey a different 'truth'.It is this notion of truth in architectural visualisation that we wanted to investigate in this edition of Architect Victoria. This is explored through a framework of time recognising that the image as an artefact of architecture is inherently temporal. We create a future for architecture through imagining what could exist, we visualise the present as a process of creation and we record and revisit the past through reimaged imagery through which we create a record of our cultural and aesthetic values.