Collages: The Latest Architecture and News

As another year draws to a close, ArchDaily's team of curators is pleased to present a selection of the best architectural drawings published throughout 2023, without which the projects' appreciation would certainly not be the same.

Architectural representation plays a fundamental role both in the design process - from the very first sketches to the finest construction details - and in its presentation to a wider audience. Thus, during the selection process, we were able to see a rich and varied set of designs that were part of the more than 4,000 project publications this year. We had the difficult task of coming up with the most representative and inspiring ones amongst them.

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ArchDaily continues a seven-year-long tradition of celebrating the best architecture drawings of the year. From painting to collages to blueprints, the 2021 edition highlights a carefully-curated collection of architectural drawings and visualizations with a wide variety of techniques and representations.

Silvia Garcia Camps has presented a series of collages of renowned works of architecture to show that, nothing is ever really invented, it's simply borrowed and mixed. In this article, we highlight her presentation.

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As architects rely heavily on imagery to convey abstract information to a broad audience, there is a recurrent conversation on the role of visualizations in architecture and how they impact the general perception of the built environment. 

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Contemporary Art Room Gallery is proud to announce their 1st “Landscapes” Online Art Competition for the month of January 2020. This is an international competition and artists from around the world are welcome to submit their work. The gallery invites all artists and photographers from around the world to submit their best representational and non-representational art related to the Landscapes theme. The Landscapes theme is considered to be any art with interpretation of natural elements such as mountains, hills, valleys, deserts, forests, farmland, trees, rivers, lakes, polar regions, rainforests, islands and tropical landscapes. All visual art mediums are acceptable (painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, digital, prints, fiber art, collage or installation art) except sound and video art.

What would historic cities look like if scale didn’t exist and functions were manipulated?

Dutch artist Tamara Stoffers found inspiration from an old Soviet Union book published in the early 1960s, which featured images of mass-housing apartment blocks without any ornamentation or color. The book highlighted the symmetry and functionality of Soviet architecture, representing what a communist future strived to look like. It became clear to her that a lot of stories lie in the history of USSR that deserve to be explored.

Stoffers' admiration extended beyond Russian architecture, looking at everyday objects, banners, postcards, and books. In a matter of 4-5 years, she put together a series of surreal collages taken from more than 30 picture books. The images, which seemed intriguing on their own, were mixed and matched with complementary photographs in an exaggerated, amusing way, presenting the Soviet Union as never seen before.

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It's not uncommon to happen upon works of architecture that resemble everyday objects. Sou Fujimoto even created an entire exhibition of "architecture" made of ashtrays, potato chips and matchboxes. Cheese graters, beehives and bottle openers appear to have been enlarged and given an architectural program (given the resemblance to their smaller counterparts).

For the past two years, we have found ourselves wanting to highlight what is the foundation of architectural practice: the architectural drawing. We realized that even after almost a decade of publishing the best projects from around the world, we should take on the task of singling out the exceptional cases of representation, taking into account all varieties and species of drawings. Following up on the criteria used in the previous edition, all the architectural drawings we have selected this year have a sensitive expression— whether it be artistic, technical or conceptual—and they all aim to express and explain the respective project using simplicity, detail, textures, 3D and color as main tools.

Below you will see the selection of drawings arranged under eight categories: Architectural Drawings, Axonometrics, Context, Diagrams, Sketches, Animated Gifs, Details and Other Techniques.

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From New York to Rome, London to Cape Town and beyond, these city mash-ups blend distinct architecture and attractions to create truly unique imagined destinations. Expedia recently launched a series of campaigns that would inspire travelers by showcasing destinations from different perspectives and unique angles. They took 14 famous cities and combined their architectural DNA into 7 unique hybrid, mash-up cities.

In the thousands of posts we publish yearly, we have the privilege of seeing a large number of impressive architecture drawings. They are submitted by established practices, architecture students, artists and, occasionally, our readers. From precise, old-school hand drawings to architectural representation that pushes the boundary of collage, photography and digital sketching, drawings hold a particular intrigue in the hearts of architecture lovers.

Since inspiration is at the heart of ArchDaily's mission, we'd like to invite all members to submit their best drawing for inclusion in our 2017 "Best Drawings" post.