ResidentialARC HOUSE: The ABC of Architects: How Buildings Become Graphics

The ABC of Architects, film artwork by Andrea Stinga and Federico González — Film artwork: Andrea Stinga and Federico González. Watch The ABC of Architects on Vimeo.

A building contains thousands of decisions. A graphic might keep five. The interesting part is deciding which five survive.

That is what makes The ABC of Architects more than a recognition game. Andrea Stinga and Federico González translate buildings into a compact visual language: outlines, blocks, gaps, colour and movement. A complex work becomes something the eye can grasp almost immediately. Other artists take that translation in different directions, assembling houses from flat components, turning architecture into a face, or making a solid building dance.

This is a story about those acts of selection. The project information is credited below; the readings of form and composition are editorial interpretation.

Stinga and González: finding the graphic skeleton

The original film credits Andrea Stinga and Federico González for concept and animation, with art direction by González. Tigrelab’s project account identifies After Effects as the production tool. The alphabetical structure gives very different buildings a shared stage.

Concept and animation: Andrea Stinga and Federico González. Art direction: Federico González. Original film and full credits on Vimeo.

The useful way to watch is to ask what remains when texture and photographic atmosphere fall away. Three examples from the film’s own building list make a good comparison:

Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier: look at the relationship between a raised horizontal volume and the slender supports beneath it. The graphic identity depends on separation as much as on mass.
Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon: follow the roof silhouette. Repeated curved elements make an outline that can remain legible even when the image is very small.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, Frank Lloyd Wright: look for the continuous rounded form and its stacked horizontal rhythm. The curve carries the recognition rather than a collection of applied details.

The film also includes the Glass House by Philip Johnson, the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe and the Pompidou Centre by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. These are invitations to compare different graphic problems: transparency, planes and exposed complexity. The animation does not have to retain every feature. It needs enough relationships to make the subject legible.

What has actually been taken apart?

“Simplification” can sound like removing detail until an image looks clean. That description misses the judgement involved. An artist first needs to decide whether the building’s identity lies in its outline, its internal order or a particular relationship between parts.

A roof can become a contour. Glazing can become an empty field. A row of columns can become a beat. A recessed entrance may read as one dark rectangle rather than a realistic shadow. These are translations between visual languages, not miniature construction drawings.

Animation adds another choice: sequence. Showing components separately can make their relationship easier to understand when they come together. The order of the graphic reveal need not be the order in which the building was built.

Matteo Muci: a house as a kit of parts

In Iconic Houses, Matteo Muci supplies the illustration, animation and music. His two minute film features Villa Savoye, the Rietveld Schröder House, Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Fallingwater.

Iconic Houses by Matteo Muci. Watch the original and read the creator’s building list.

Read the five houses as different sets of graphic ingredients. Farnsworth House and the Glass House offer a comparison between a frame and the transparent enclosure it holds. Fallingwater suggests a different emphasis: projecting horizontal elements and the relationship between a house and its setting. Rietveld’s house directs attention towards distinct planes, edges and colour accents.

Muci’s film is a useful companion to the ABC because the subject is tighter: five homes rather than an alphabet of architects. Watch for the moment at which each arrangement becomes recognisable. Is it already clear from the frame, or does recognition arrive with a roof, a projecting terrace or a final coloured plane?

Federico Babina: architecture becomes a portrait

Babina changes the question. Rather than reducing a building to an icon, his Archiportrait series makes architects’ faces from their architectural language. His project statement describes 33 portraits, using selected geometries to suggest likeness, personality and expression.

Here the artist is translating across subjects: building into person. A useful way to read the series is to look first for a face, then for the architectural parts that create it. Openings, planes and volumes stop behaving only as elements of buildings. Their arrangement has another job: allowing the viewer to perceive a character.

That is a more interpretive operation than a diagram. It is not intended to explain how a particular project is assembled or occupied. It asks whether an architect’s work can become a graphic vocabulary distinctive enough to describe the architect too.

Explore Babina’s Archiportrait project and artist statement ↗

Another example: Archiquote

In his Novedge interview, Babina explains Archiquote: posters where architects’ words and visual identities meet in the form of imagined signs. The interview includes examples associated with Mies van der Rohe and Charles and Ray Eames.

The shift is revealing. In one series, geometry becomes facial features; in another, a statement becomes graphic architecture. Babina also describes combining hand drawing, vector techniques and three dimensional modelling. The tool changes, but the generating idea comes first.

See the Archiquote examples and read Babina’s account of his process ↗

Axel de Stampa: give the repeated element a life of its own

Axel de Stampa’s Architecture Animée reverses a familiar experience. Instead of a visitor moving around a still building, animation makes the building itself change while the viewer stays put. His original series uses architectural photographs and loops. The separate animated stickers below are shared through his own GIPHY channel.

VitraHaus. Animated work by Axel de Stampa, referencing the building by Herzog & de Meuron. View on the artist’s GIPHY channel.

New Museum. Animated work by Axel de Stampa, referencing the building by SANAA. View on the artist’s GIPHY channel.

The two subjects invite different readings of repetition. VitraHaus has the familiar outline of a pitched roof volume, repeated into an unfamiliar whole. The New Museum presents an offset stack. Watch the units rather than the overall silhouette: separating a repeated part from its neighbours changes how the whole is read.

The movement is artistic invention. It should not be mistaken for a demonstration of a building’s structure or an actual kinetic feature. The value is in how exaggeration makes a compositional idea harder to overlook.

Four approaches, four questions

Stinga and González: which small set of features makes a building recognisable?
Muci: how do separate graphic components become a house?
Babina: can architectural geometry describe a person or an idea?
De Stampa: what becomes apparent when a repeated form is allowed to move?

These works are not all doing the same thing. An icon, an assembly, a portrait and an animated transformation each ask the viewer to notice something different. That makes them more interesting together than a collection of attractive architectural pictures.

Try it with an ordinary house

Choose a house that is not a famous monument. Draw it three times: as a solid silhouette, as five separate shapes and as a pattern of openings. Which version explains the building best? Which loses something essential?

If none of the drawings makes the design understandable, the answer may be to look at the plan. An exterior graphic cannot explain a protected courtyard, a quiet route to a bedroom or the quality of light beside a kitchen bench. Those relationships still matter even when they resist becoming a logo.

The best architectural graphics sharpen our attention. They give us an entry into a building, then send us back to the architecture with a better question.

Sources and artwork: creator credits and project links appear beside each example. Films and animated stickers are shown through their supplied platforms; linked galleries remain on their original sites. Artwork belongs to the respective creators. Formal readings and comparisons in this article are editorial interpretation.