The visual aestheticization of the architectural project and its relationship with the duration of the image

Abstract

In a period in which architecture privileges its communication through the image instead to other traditional systems such as elevations, plants or perspectives, in a global process that authors such as Joan Fontcuberta have defined within the second digital revolution like the ‘fury of the images’: the photographs circulate through the network at a vertigo speed; they have ceased to have a passive role and that extraordinary kinetic energy makes them leave their traditional place giving us the opportunity to update a reflection on issues that affect culture, art, communication, and ultimately, the same human condition so, therefore to architecture. Although the relationship between architecture and photography is widely known and has been studied on numerous occasions, until relatively recently, the importance of photography to architecture had always been subordinated. In the words of Jacques Herzog himself, “from a photographer we expect images, maybe we did not expect architecture to begin thinking by images”. It is then necessary to ask how this relationship with the visual aestheticization of architecture is affecting the process of the genesis of the architectural project and how the immediacy of these images is related to their design.