Like other architects, we photograph our work when it is finished. We also think about how those photographs can project our work forward, beyond the representation of past projects. These ‘One Liners’ are image projections that make new objects and spaces only loosely related to Second House, the subject of the original photos.

These image-objects are perspectival illusions akin to the Baroque frescos painted on church ceilings and palace walls throughout Europe. Like the paintings in that tradition, they produce perfect illusionary spaces when viewed from a single projection point, but immediately morph and change when viewed from anywhere else. In that sense, they are a cheap trick or ‘one liner’ that fails easily. But that failure contains alternate versions of the perfect illusion, other possible spaces and architectures – in this case, other versions of our Second House that were never built.

Architectural illusion is the union of drawn space and built space, the virtual and the physical. These are convex, physical objects that contain concave, pictorial spaces – many of them.

Team: Alexander Kim , Takayuki Tachibe, Iris Kim

Original Photography of Second House by Eric Staudenmaier