Lecture
21 Novembre, 2016
Philipp Schaerer
architect, Zürich, visiting professor AR
Composite
We live in a visual environment whose aesthetics are increasingly determined by digital media and we keep turning into users of predefined computer and software based processing technologies. The aesthetics created in this way have become more and more interchangeable. A rich variety of visual manifestations is now on the verge of withering away be it in the fields of architecture, graphic arts, photography or other design disciplines.
Digital image processes afford a hitherto unknown freedom as far as compositional expressions are concerned; these might be only used sparingly at the moment but will certainly be of increasing relevance in the future. Furthermore, the expanding accessibility of digital components and their ever more sophisticated editing functions will create a working environment where composition as an architect’s ability and competence will be of growing importance.
Philipp Schaeter
Philipp Schaerer is a visual artist and architect, specializing in the field of digital image processing. His work is at the intersection of architecture, photography and graphic design and exploits the freedom offered by two-dimensional imaging techniques and the increasing blurring of the boundaries between an image and the pictorial representation of reality.
After graduating from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000, Philipp worked from 2000-2006 as an architect and knowledge manager for Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. During this time he created many well-known architectural illustrations for the studio that substantially influenced the visual language of today’s established architectural visualizations. At the Chair for Computer-Aided Architectural Design of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), Philipp was responsible until 2008 for the Postgraduate Studies in CAAD under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt. Since 2008, Philipp has been a lecturer at several universities and, from 2014, a visiting professor in the department of Architecture (Art et Architecture) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).
His work has been widely published and exhibited and is represented in several public and private collections – among others in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York MOMA; the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe ZKM; The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal; and the Fotomuseum Winterthur. Philipp Schaerer lives and works in Zurich and Steffisburg (Switzerland).