Research

  • Seamless, Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture
  • GRANTEE
    Jesús Vassallo
    GRANT YEAR
    2014

Philipp Schaerer, digital collage, Bildbau 5, 2007.

During the past fifty years, documentary photography and architecture have become increasingly interdependent. Departing from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's infatuation with the photographs of Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore, the relationship between architects and artists in the documentary tradition has gradually become closer and more instrumental, resulting in recent collaborations such as that between Herzog and de Meuron, as well as Thomas Ruff or Caruso St John and Thomas Demand. Seamless foregrounds a new generation of young photographers and architects in Central Europe, who are operating in a mode which produces images and architecture made from fragments of reality.

Jesús Vassallo is an architect and writer form Madrid, Spain. He studied architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and ETSAM in Madrid. He is currently an assistant professor at Rice University, where his research revolves around the problem of realism in architecture. His articles have been published internationally in publications such as AA Files, Harvard Design Magazine, 2G, Future Anterior, Domus, Arquitectura Viva, and Arkitektur DK; Vassallo also serves as editor for Circo magazine.