Philipp Schaerer

Philipp Schaerer creates his visualisations mostly by means of digital image montage. It consists of the combination of several images or image parts, which are put together on the computer to create a new image. With this technique, almost everything can be newly created.

The series of images with the title „Bildbauten“ deals with the effect and the claim to credibility of images of architecture that appear to be photographs. It further questions the medium “photograph” as a documentary piece of evidence depicting reality.

Frontal views of fictional architectures serve as an example. By means of their exaggerated and orchestrated way of representation, they model themselves on the object-like appearance and the formal language of contemporary architecture in a rather ironic way. All images try to reproduce a reality. They are not a photograph; instead, they were newly designed and constructed from scratch by means of image synthesis and digital image editing.

Visto primeiro em / Seen first in: Shrapnel Contemporary
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Sketches, photographs and calculated CAD-components serve as a basis. For the architectural visualisation, a simply calculated model is used as an initial image in order to maintain the perspective legitimacy of a project. The composition is made with an image editing software. By means of a detailed creation of the surface areas, the light and variations of contrast and colour saturation, individual parts of the image can be elaborated in a more sophisticated manner. Thus, the concreteness and the presence of the important image elements can be increased considerably.

After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) as an architect in 2000, Philipp Schaerer (1972) worked as an architect and knowledge manager for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel (2000-2006). During his four years working as a research assistant at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Faculty of Architecture (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt, he was able to continuously develop his knowledge in the area of digital image processing. Working as a freelance architect and image creator today, his main interest lies not only in design and in the execution of small scale projects, but also in creating images of architecture and the built environment. His work comments on this issue.