Pixel Brick Fiction: Filip Dujardin's Montages

What is architecture? That is the fundamental question that has occupied the architectural discipline since at least the Renaissance, when Leon-Battista Alberti famously defined the modern principle of architectural design as an intellectual endeavour, predicated on the separation of the material act of construction and the abstract act of design. Since then, architecture has existed in the space between ideas and construction or, more recently, between Pixel and Brick.

Filip Dujardin’s montages provide fertile ground to continue this discussion, as they explore the mediation between imagination and reality, between architecture’s fiction and construction; as they continuously question the conventional functions and forms of architectural elements by subtly subverting expectations.

Taking as starting point Dujardin’s hyper-realistic montages of architectural fictions, this exhibition reflects on the duplicitous character of architecture as developed by the resonance between abstract idea and concrete realization, questioning where the boundary between the two lies. By transforming Dujardin’s collages into models, the tension between the two-dimensionality of imagery and the three-dimensionality of space is explored, while by braking those same collages into their constituent elements, the vocabulary of Dujardin’s imagined architecture is made ever more visible.