Real and unreal

Posted in Architecture

Filip Dujardin handles with architectural photography and he is fascinated by the sculptural shapes of the buildings.

His job makes possible to combine his two great passions: photography and architecture, subjects he deepened during his studies. Often, he took a stab at taking photos of impersonal buildings in Belgium, in particular in Gand, city where he was born. This activity caused him a great sense of frustration because of the lack of expressive power of the architectures.

So, he soon needed to be the protagonist of the architectural structure of the building and decided to create an artistic technique that makes him free to be an architect, even if he doesn’t work with Cad, Rhinoceros and physical models: digitally, he designs architectures, with a strong sculptured impact, by using small architectural fragments, coming from the bulidings that he had shooted.

Dujardin tries to design architectural structures which are half way between what is real and what is unreal; structures which are too abstract to be real and too real to belong to science fiction.

Three aspects of Dujardin’s work touched me so much.
First, considering the physical aspect of his architectures, he stresses a peculiar mark of the postmodern architecture, that concerns on the assemble of architectural fragments, developping architectures with no function.

Then, if we consider the conceptual meaning of his work, Dujardin’s work often criticizes the modern architecture, that is made of standardized elements, by designing buildings made of different and customized elements.

At last, if we consider his work as a strategical project, he utterly achieved his expressive aims: his structures with their abnormal elements appear incredibly real. This is probably the aspect of Dujardin’s photos I like most: the power of being perfectly suspended between real and unreal. Rather, among true, false and ostensible.