I was invited by architect Paul Mouchet (Vplus/CentralOffice) and Thierry Decuypere (Vplus), teachers in master at La Cambre- ULB Architecture University in Brussels to develop a workshop about photography and scale models.
Together, we tried to work with the students on new way to use architecture models, by building models that were made only in order to be photographed. The idea was to try to push students to express the main intentions of their project through a single image. An image that can replace an 3d renderings or a sketch and that can still create the feeling of their personal aesthetics intentions.
What interested us was the creation of an ambiguous image, an image representing more than a model, yet still not representing reality. We asked students to try different possibilities by working on those three parameters:
- Construction materials and the scales that they each imply, such as bricks, concrete, paper, plaster, wood,… - The furnitures, plants and accessories giving informations about the general scale of the project. - The backgrounds, creating different renderings, more or less realistic, by adding images, paintings or collages.
We demanded a frontal or orthogonal framing to students so that the results of the workshop would be seen as a catalogue of possibilities.
All the models were created at the scale 1/20 and were built as sets, then i shot the models with photography studio equipment.
