Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture: Exercises, Provocations, and Theories of Digital Representation

How and why do architects, artists and designers manipulate reality? 

This book answers that question by examining what it means to render, draw, represent, and mediate the elements that make up and affect our digital and physical worlds. From pixels and rooms to gaming spaces and dioramas, this book exposes approaches to rendering that are equal parts instructive and critical. In the pursuit of the strange and the uncanny, digital media and software aren’t taken for granted, nor are they always used as intended. This journey is forward-looking about the emerging role of gaming engines, volumetric raytracing, and procedural shaders, but also looks back and samples from some ‘80s and ‘90s classics including MacPaint, DOOM, the Star Trek Holodeck and the film Predator.

Carl Lostritto is the Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  He was previously the Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor at RISD Architecture in Providence, Rhode Island. His research, practice and scholarship focus on design computation, especially with respect to drawing and rendering. In 2019 Lostritto published Computational Drawing, From Foundational Exercises to Theories of Representation. (AR+D Publishing).He lectures widely and exhibits speculative works of art and architecture aimed at exposing and disrupting architecture’s relationship to representation and media.  

Viola Ago is an Albanian architectural designer and researcher. She directs MIRACLES Architecture and recently held the Wortham fellowship at the Rice University School of Architecture.

Julie Kress is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Architecture + Design. Her work straddles across realms of architecture, exhibition design, and research in digital media.

Hans Tursack recently served as the MIT Pietro Belluschi research fellow. His writing and scholarly work have appeared in Perspecta, Pidgin, Thresholds, Log Dimensions, Archinect, and the Architects Newspaper.