Architecture spins, zooms, slides, grows, shrinks and blooms like oversized artificial flowers in animated GIF form, with the effects originating from both fantasy motions that the real-life buildings don’t actually perform and functional movable parts. With these graphics we see architecture from a new perspective as it seems to take on a life of its own – and while watching elements of a building click into place from the sky like a game of Tetris is satisfying, it’s also really cool to see how transforming elements of real buildings work, like a massive sliding metal roof that covers or uncovers an all-glass house at the push of a button.
M.C. Escher and the Droste Effect
M.C. Escher’s drawing of a landscape. spotted inside a window (Prentententoonstelling or ‘Print Gallery’, 1956), serves as the basis of this Droste effect gif. The artist used a mathematical grid to create the twisted perspective in the original drawing, and then researchers at Leiden University reproduced it on a computer, adjusted the perspective and applied the zooming effect.
Rapid Perspective Shift
This somewhat disorienting gif gives us an idea of what it would be like to zoom through a city in a flying car, quickly shifting our perspective of a single building’s corner several times.
8 Animated Architectural Images by Axel de Stampa
A series of structures by famous architecture firms like MVRDV and Herzog de Meuron come to life in these gifs by Paris-based architects Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux. The Mirador Buidling by the former zooms into place on the ground like a life-sized game of Tetris, while the randomly stacked levels of the latter’s Vitra House appear and disappear. ‘Architecture Animée’ adds a fourth dimension to architecture by quickly applying changes that normally would only be seen with the passage of time.
Sliding Pergolas House
We get to see just how the star feature of the ‘Sliding Pergolas House’ in Brazil by FGMF Arquitetos works in this fun gif. The movable roof elements make it possible to shelter some areas of the spacious courtyard while letting sun stream into others.
