![]() “Let’s make a drawing look as old as it can,” he says, “but at the forefront of technology.” He has started exploring the possibilities of AI, which in response to a series of prompts – for example “artistic illustration, Wallace & Gromit machines, architectural drawing, 8k octane render, ultra detail and depth” – will come up with an image that the world has never seen before. ![]() Shaikh himself runs the gamut of techniques – pencil, paint, Photoshop, digital collage. Ana Aragão, based in Oporto, draws teetering megastructures, from the Tower of Babel to modern Japan, in Biro and coloured pencil, by crawling over large sheets of paper laid flat on the floor.Īna Aragão drawing a Tower of Babel. Some of these images use digital technology to the full, some are hand-drawn, some a combination of both. Most are complicated and layered, an exception being the deft “architecture anomalies” of Saul Kim ( 107k Instagram followers), wherein normal-looking buildings fold or tilt or morph from one shape to another. “That’s beautiful” might be your first reaction, followed by, “What is it?” The best show mesmerising levels of craft. ![]() The moods of the works are variously dreamy, dystopian, playful and hopeful, some of them visions, some illustrations. Memory Palace, by Clement Luk Laurencio, is an abstract representation of times and places familiar to the artist. The works by the living include a “fictional skyline of Tokyo” by Veronika Ikonnikova, where traditional wooden houses have been transposed to the tops of skyscrapers, and a digital collage by Zain Al-Sharaf that records the erasures of the family’s Palestinian neighbourhood under Israeli rule. Lent by Drawing Matter, a private collection of 35,000 architectural drawings and models housed in Somerset, these exhibits will include a rough crayon sketch by Le Corbusier for an unbuilt Olympic stadium in Baghdad the Post-it notes on which Zaha Hadid delivered her ideas to her staff and a 1798 drawing of a Roman basilica by the French neoclassicist Charles Percier. This combines contemporary drawings with those of great architects in the past. There is also an exhibition, Vanishing Points, opening this week at the Roca London Gallery. It remains to be seen what happens when these visions encounter the demands of plumbing and fire codes Prompted by endless questions from students as to how particular drawings were made, it is a guide to “drawing attention” to ideas “that may be revolutionary”. From this ferment has come a book, Drawing Attention: Architecture in the Age of Social Media, to be published by RIBA Publishing. “We were just sat there at our desks in this digital storm,” he says, “wanting to connect more.” So they did. Shaikh has built up what he calls “worldwide collectives” of like-minded people, a process accelerated during lockdown. Alongside fantastical compositions by himself or his peers, he makes forays into history: the intricate tiles and brickwork in the Mughal mosque of his ancestral village in Pakistan the timber-lined nest of knowledge that is the Library of Trinity College Dublin a consummate pen-and-wash cross-section through an 18th-century Parisian theatre. Shaikh, 27, is following the trajectory of many young architects: after the completion of his training he is working in the London office of the multinational practice Gensler – except that he is also an Instagram influencer, attracting nearly 30,000 followers to his posts of architectural drawings and photographs of buildings. They don’t all use the most advanced techniques all the time – some work by hand, some (Shaikh included) with hybrids of manual and digital – but all use the internet to spread their work and exchange ideas. They do this not by realising completed buildings, but through compelling images of imaginary architecture. If, in the past, aspiring architects had to claw their way up a profession that favoured those with connections and money, now anyone from anywhere can make a name for themselves, if they have the talent, determination and access to technology. There is also, as Shaikh justifiably claims, a social transformation. And indeed, if it is not yet clear how blocks of flats or schools or shopping centres near you might be changed by this revolution, the energy and invention behind it are undeniable. ![]() “Architecture is entering a new age.” The ways in which buildings are imagined and communicated are, he argues, being transformed by a combination of social media and the ever-evolving techniques of digital drawing, to which artificial intelligence is adding new capabilities. “Something big is happening,” says Hamza Shaikh.
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