After Affects

An independently led seminar, challenging the conventional documentation of buildings by looking closely at reflection, transparency, blurriness and flatness through various lenses, instructed in 2022

After Affects considers how phenomena emerge from an alchemy of material play and construction details, and slip away as we pass through the built environment. Reflection, transparency, blurriness and flatness unfold around us and are often forgotten subjects in architectural representation, replaced by a single image or rendering to offer a wholistic view of a building’s formal characteristics. The seminar studies these elusive qualities across historical and theoretical precedents that explore the overlap of architecture and photography, affect and image, frame and aperture. Borrowing photographic and cinematic techniques from contemporary practices, a series of exercises investigates the role of image making to record and perceive space acutely, and perhaps in turn, inform how we conceive and construct architecture.

Image Credit: Abigail Chang

Featured Student Work: Braeden Daugherty, Roger Hany Awad Labib, Jade Jones, Kianna Negron

Contributors: University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture students led by Abigail Chang