Joao Pereira de Sousa, Architect & founder of BRAVDESIGN, recently shared with us an interview he did with Architect/Illustrator Philipp Schaerer.
As an ETH-trained Architect, Philipp Schaerer (1972) currently works as a freelance image designer. He is specialised in digital montage techniques and CGI (Computer Generated Imagery). After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as an architect in 2000, Philipp Schaerer worked as an Architect, knowledge manager and image creator in the field of digital image editing for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel during six years (2000-2006). He created many well known architectural visualisations for this office and has substantially influenced the visual language of today’s established architectural visualizations. 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 techniques. He gives lectures and conducts workshops at several universities in Switzerland.
I have been in touch with Philipp’s work for some years now. At first, I found a small image of one of his artworks somewhere in an architecture magazine. Though I was not totally interested in finding more about its author at the time, later when I decided to google his name, I found out his website with showcase of some of his work. That was when I got a great deal of interest in the kind of work he was doing. Most of his commissioned work I had already seen published in numerous magazines, but when I was introduced to his personal artworks it was like taking a step into a completely new reality. And in fact, the term real is what really interests me the most about his work. Philipp usually starts from an idea and a simple sketch and then, through the use of photomontages, he then generates a whole new semi-abstract image based on existing textures and elements which are put together into generating a whole new dimension. His work is definitely worth a long look and deserves the kind of attention which Philipp engages into all his artworks.
