How architecture turns into art

Spanish artist and photographer Victor Enrich started changing building photos throughout his journey to Riga, Latvia. The first was a picture called “City Portraits”, he flipped one of the city’s road bridges before giving the building flying into the sky at a 90-degree angle.

Other photos in the “City Portraits” torsional pillar blocks into beautiful unreal forms, adding stories-high slides on suburban blocks and performing unbelievable top-heavy towers that seem to stand without basic maintenance.

Enrich studied  Architecture before going on to work as a 3D visualizer, helping to projects for a plurality of architects, engineers, and real estate companies. This work changed his ideas.

“I assumed that it was time to begin using the systems that I’d been studying, but on the streets”, he said in a telephone conversation. “I left my job and started experimenting. Without any purpose. I liked it and it is something new today”

Once he has photographed a construction, Enrich digitally plans the perspective and the building’s structural materials. After changing or differently changing the construction, he need accurately use texture, coloring, and shading to create something realistic as possible.

The one picture can be made in three weeks, though his 2013 design “NHDK” – in which Enrich manipulated a single photo of Munich hotel into a series of 88 different forms – took more than eight months to complete.

Since its popularization during the Renaissance focused on conscientiously imitating idealized ideas of buildings or constructing. But while Enrich’s architecture is typical fresh – in both style and result – he sees connections between his art and that of traditional artists.

“One of the elements I really like doing is tracing — like the Old Masters”, he said, pointing to the discussed ideas that Renaissance artists first followed out pictures using a lens. They painted what they saw and were able to remember. I do the same thing, only in the digital environment”