Hans Tursack's essay "Theoretical Notes on the Aesthetics of Texture Mapping" now published in ACADIA 2020 Distributed Proximities: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture discusses our Watch Tower project among an incredible line up of colleagues.
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Hans Tursack: (...)If enlarged photographic images of the southwestern landscape dematerialise geometric substrates for Heizer, the office Alam/Profeta takes this process to a new extreme using photogrammetry and lidar scans of building sites to translate architectural solids into vaporous image-clouds. In projects such as Watchtower (2018), Casa Zwei (2018- 19), and Street|Scape (2017) the office moves between consumer smartphone photogrammetry apps (Autodesk ReCap), and premium, high-end Leica lidar equipment to survey sites for architectural interventions. By beginning with machine vision, A/P mobilse the survey (rendered as point cloud objects) as a design agent. (...) A/P relishes the opportunity to render visual information from vaporous renderings (a medieval tower translated into a field of free-floating cloud-points) into the emphatic materiality of Cor-Ten steel, locally-sourced, building-scale, sandstone color printing, and custom-fabricated bricks. In A/P’s oeuvre, composition as we conventionally define it is almost entirely absent. Instead, image’s give birth to models, models become renderings, renderings become textures, and textures materialize through material research.
