Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture by Carl Lostritto

Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture addresses how and why architects, artists, and designers manipulate reality. Front and centre in this discourse is the role of rendering. Most often, to render is to engage a thick software interface, to accept a photographic framework of variables and effects, and to assume an unquestioned posture of articulating material, mass, and colour. But like drawing, rendering is an interdisciplinary, algorithmic, historically rooted cultural practice as much as it is a digital vocation. The elements explored in this book are labelled "impossible" because they avoid a fixed relationship to a singular built reality. Digital bonsai trees, pixels, video game levels, grids, and dioramas extend like skewers through multiple media and formats. Through work that looks very real and can't possibly exist, representation becomes the territory of speculation, ambiguity, and curiosity.

Carl Lostritto is an associate professor and graduate program director at RISD Architecture. His teaching, practice, and research explores the intersections between computation and representation.

Viola Ago is an Albanian architectural designer and researcher. She directs MIRACLES Architecture and recently held the Wortham fellowship at the Rice University School of Architecture.

Julie Kress is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee Knoxville College of Architecture + Design. Her work straddles across realms of architecture, exhibition design, and research in digital media.

Hans Tursack recently served as the MIT Pietro Belluschi research fellow. His writing and scholarly work have appeared in Perspecta, Pidgin, Thresholds, Log Dimensions, Archinect, and the Architects Newspaper.