Impossible Architecture

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Fillip Dujardin, D’Ville 007, 2012

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WAM Architecten, Inntel Hotel

I have written before about not being that interested in artists who seamless use photoshop to create a new reality. For me collage is much more about the possible converges, distortions, agglomerations, reconstructions, consolidations, disintegrations, deconstructions, reconstitutions, connections, intervention, and reconfigurations and the interactions of the two disparate forms together and the enjoyment of trying to decipher the new reality that was created. I am much more interested in the possible converges, distortions, agglomerations, reconstructions, consolidations, disintegrations, deconstructions, reconstitutions, connections, intervention, and reconfigurations However, with that said, I have been super intrigued with Filip Dujardin‘s work for the last couple of years. I continually revisit his photographs to try and negotiate the forms and make sense of them. These images really engage and inspire me and I didn’t understand why until now. They are impossible architecture, forms collaged together and seamlessly pasted in photoshop and google SketchUp. Despite the fact that they are fictions and do not exist in real life, they are also very familiar. They are built from familiar components that we have all seen in our everyday life. And while we really haven’t seen these buildings, we have seen their parts.

In the last decade, we have also seen some pretty extraordinary and spectacular advancements in architecture and architects have really pushed the limits of what is possible and impossible in the built form. Dujardin’s photographs reveal the “almost impossible architecture of today” as a springboard to ‘build’ these fantastical buildings. While his structures still might seem implausible, they are constructed with some the understanding of architecture and gravity. Therefore, they seem somewhat plausible and believable (in a very weird and wonderful way). As I have quoted Henri Lefebvre in past posts, demanding the impossible is the only way to get all that is possible. In other words the very idea of the ‘impossible’ is the starting point of possible. And maybe that is why I like these works so much, not for their impossibility of the built form but for the possibilities they inform future forms.

This post highlights some of the architecture that came to mind when I was looking at Dujardin’s work, many of the works, which when they were built were considered groundbreaking.