The categorization of images has greatly changed through serial advancements in digital data processing and computation, resulting in a new approach to information aesthetics in architectural image-making. From 1960 to 1980, early developments of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and digital simulation began to define a shift in image-making, turning to digital tools and territories. Following the release of the first commercial CAD programs in the late 1970s, the digital presence within the profession grew—the computer was no longer relegated to business or science professions; it was a new medium of image-making.¹ Through the adoption of the computer, architects were exposed to fluid exchanges of information and perhaps, conditioned by these exchanges to expect serialized complex outputs. As our digital territories continue to expand, our choices in what data we can represent multiply, and as a result, the line between abstract and technical images continues to blur. John May observes our attitude towards these blurred categories, “casually referring to them as drawings, or photographs, or diagrams, or renderings, often exchanging those names without care,”² implying our digital bias allows us to compound multiple types into single images; information is no longer bound to singular representations. To cope with this, we have turned to the diagram as a multiplier to images, able to continuously adapt and reflect changing inputs.

Our turn to the informative image is the next step in what May describes as "post-orthography"—images are no longer solely static analog representations of buildings as we expect them to appear when built; they are dynamic representations of information, abstracting perceivable and invisible data. We see the hybridized emerge in contemporary practice, looking at studios like MOS, whose signature image is the “screenshot”—a semi-rendered building within software, often accompanied by notation lines with an xyz positioning. This looseness between boundaries of image types reflects our struggle between levels of resolution, resulting in today’s "over-informed" images. Able to represent the physical and metaphysical, architects still need to fine-tune levels of resolution for the sake of effective visual communications. Our ability to view a building elevation as a heat map of light coverage, or a plan as circulatory arrows, suggests layers of diagramming as our primary tactic to disseminate these multitudes. The diagram is our instrument to abstract rich data into low-resolution visuals, allowing us to overlay and read datasets easily. Stan Allen asserts the diagrammatic approach to confront dissolving boundaries: “A Diagrammatic practice… locates itself between the actual and the virtual, and foregrounds [architecture],” the diagram can bridge digital and physical interests, effectively “architecture’s best means to engage the complexity of the real.”³

The diagram allows us to better navigate the porous boundary between image-types as computational advancements allow images to carry more complexity.

As we use them now, images are data-rich visualizations, operating between the experiential and the technical, with new media tools allowing us to continuously encrypt data within images. We can now layer animation, simulation, and representation as a means to explore and reiterate designs thanks to our digital toolset. As digital production becomes our standard mode of operation, we must begin to take critical stances on how we allow the digital to command our images, making sure to intervene with human-defined priorities. As universities continue to expand coursework to scripting, web-based territories, and simulation, there will certainly continue to be a bottom-up ripple in representational traditions, anticipating further “over-informed” images. Repositioning Robin Evans—if architects make drawings of buildings⁴, in a post-orthogonal, post-digital profession, it's possible now that architects make images of information of buildings.

1. Matthew Allen, “Representing Computer-Aided Design: Screenshots and the Interactive Computer circa 1960,” Perspectives on Science, vol. 24, no. 6 (2016): 637–668.
2. John May, Signal. Image. Architecture. (Columbia Books, 2019), p. 7.
3. Stan Allen, “Diagrams Matter,” ANY no. 23 (1998): 16–19.
4. Robin Evans, “Translations from Buildings to Drawings,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (MIT Press, 2023).

Over the last two decades, architectural representation has leaned hard into realism. Renderings today don’t just suggest a building—they stage it. Trees sway, people smile, and golden-hour light floods perfect interiors. It’s not design anymore; it’s performance. And while these images can be stunning, they’re also setting traps.

The main issue? Expectations. Clients see a rendering and assume that’s what they’ll get, down to the last ray of sunlight. But architecture is messy. Budgets shift, materials change, and site conditions push back. The final building rarely matches the image, and that gap between simulation and reality can erode trust.

There’s also a deeper problem. Space becomes secondary to surface when everything looks “real” from the start. We’re designing for the camera, not the body. You start picking textures that render well, or forms that cast nice shadows, rather than thinking through how a space breathes, how it’s used. The seductive power of the image begins to drive the design.

Worse still, many of these images are built from the same libraries, same trees, same furniture, same cool lifestyle flourishes. The result is a weird visual monoculture. A city in Norway starts to look like one in Korea or Brazil. Context, climate, and culture get blurred out in favor of a globally legible aesthetic. Instead of provoking architectural debate, the image smooths over friction and hides contradictions.

The tools themselves aren’t the enemy, but our relationship with them needs rethinking. We need to reintroduce doubt, ambiguity, and even error into the process. Not every project needs to be sold like a luxury product. There’s value in representation that invites questions instead of answering them too neatly. A drawing can lie, too, but at least it leaves something open. A perfect rendering, ironically, closes things off. And that’s where imagination starts to suffer.

Architecture is not a building. Any buildings or artifacts created by architects are, strictly speaking, a product of the manufacturer or contractor. They are more like a secondary outcome of what architects actually produce, an idea and knowledge with data they perceived. Instead, there are representative mediums that architects use in order to convince laymen, scholars, and stakeholders such as text, scaled models, and images. From mind to paper, nowaday on-screen and on virtual platforms, our profession exists on the representation canvas, communicating and influencing society culturally. Among the tools, the use of discursive images has been an efficient tool to enlarge architectural practice by generating discussion on ideas, aligning the culture to the current, and formalizing the principles and theories of space. Recently, with the overflow of data and knowledge from computing and the world wide web, the process faces the change from distribution of architect’s knowledge and immigration of other professional fields. Moreover, the detachment of the image produced and the creator accelerates the phenomenon. We are at the hinge point in the middle of the digital era where changes and transitions occur every second and struggle with finding architects’ immanent value of image products. To recover our value, the architect needs to start by adapting the immersive technologies and reclaim the new form of a discursive image as a product of the profession. The puristic form of spatial ideas and cultural ideology of architectural perspective must be reclaimed in the digital world by competing against or collaborating with non-architectural creators otherwise, presumably architectural profession would no longer exist in the current structural system. Architects with no built project would be possibly considered as other digital creators if we cannot refind ourselves the distinctive value of the product of practice in architecture. Would this emergence of immersive technologies be a threat to our profession or be a precursor to enlarging our field of practice? How would architectural discursive images transform from static images?

1. According to Leon Battista Alberti, the role of an architect is dealing with the representation of a building and separated from the work of constructing a building by sculpteur and modeleur. Even today, the architectural process such as 3d modeling, diagrams and renderings are in the same criteria, projecting the ‘product’ on a medium such as paper or screen. Naturally, architecture in the sate of projecting on medium has virtual properties. The ceiling fresco of a cathedral building follows the logic that it is purposely drawn with a perspective angle looking up to heaven above one’s head. Nowadays, virtual reality and cyberspace create ever-changing sequence of images and they become sufficiently real that percieved as a spatial environment. Also, Robin Evans so astutely observed in his seminal 1986 essay, “translations from Drawing to Building,” architects don’t make buildings they make drawings. Although much has changed since he made this observation, particularly with respect to disciplinary representational practices, drawings and constructed images remain the primary media of architectural design. Therefore, architecture follows the principle of projecting building rather than building itself as a completed physical artifact.
   
2. In the book of Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from Outside (2001, p.15), “The in-between in architectural space is not a literal perceptual or audible sensation, but an affective somatic response that is felt by the body in space” said Peter Eisenman. Architecture is not just a building, but ideas. Many architects attempt to prove and distinguish the definition of architecture from a physical body by different representative manifestos. Daniel Libeskind’s architecture is subsisted in Micromegas, Architecture of Rem Koolhaas breathes in his literature and diagrams and Tschumi’s idea of architecture is in his array of Folies while Archigram and Superstudio illustrate the ideal architecture in their drawings of an idea. In this notion, paper architecture is not preparation or process to be built but architectural reality because instead of the location of the physical body, its idea decides its own existence. It is alike the reality of our world where the virtual world in social media seems to be more realistic. In conclusion, if Virtual Reality is another environment that is capable of creating affective somatic responses and representing ideas or disciplines of space and architecture, can architects work exactly the same as the real world in the new cyber platform?
3. I read an interview with Peter Trummer and was inspired by his argument about the potential of non-built projects which consists of more meaningful ideas on architecture by comparing CCTV Headquarters and Max Reinhardt Tower by Peter Eisenman. In this sense, a representative image that demonstrates the idea of architecture, space, and the paradigm never dies or be outdated but still has the essence of the idea within its purest form, and is ready for realization by the technological advance.
4. As we’ve already started to see, advances in both digital and construction technologyㅑㄴ enabled architects to express and realize forms that could only have been conceptualized previously. The ideas embedded in images continue to inspire and keep communicating to others generations with its legacy. It also means that the discursive images as precursors do not create a hinge point only at the period but provoke the potential of unexpected possibilities to any certain future eras. Then, how do we distinguish or realize the indication ahead that which idea of images created by architects will make a hinge point in the future? Can we understand and learn this algorithm by looking at predated instances?
5. According to Vassallo, Jesus,  a Spanish architect and writer, in his book ‘Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Architecture’, quoted, The current condition of infinite multiplication and instant access to images can be seen as a point of saturation within a preexisting process, a turn that is fostering a mechanism for the reception, construction, and communication of meaning through the aggregation of images. In our new digital ecosystem, images detach themselves from their creators and their original locations in the world, thus becoming the context for other images. This new associative logic based on chains of images puts forward the possibility of a universal visual language…” Detachment of images and creators in the digital realm questions the authorship and its consequences in terms of collective creativity.
6. Filip Dujardin (Manipulation of Photography) — Manipulation photography of found building demonstrates impossible architecture. He entertain an idea of building in different location in a fictional alternative through physically impossible structures or smaller missing details in the material or design elements. The images focus on the personalty of the structures and make transparent the whimsical, artistic side available in architecture and offering a challenge in walking the fine line between reality and fiction. Through new technology introduced in the digital period, we can more easily see architectural significance outside thje discipline from theaccessibility to these technologies.
7. Reyner Banham also writes on the production of architecture, that our value comes not from our products but from the process: “What then would distinguish the products of this black box from those of other thinkable modes? Functional or environmental performance? Beauty of form or deftness of space? Truth to materials or structural efficiency? These are all qualities for which the architectural profession habitually congratulates itself, but a Buckminster Fuller dome or an Eskimo igloo can usually beat architecture on all six counts, and so can a lot of other buildings, ships, airliners, inflatables and animal lairs. So why do we not admit that what distinguishes architecture is not what is done – since, on their good days, all the world and his wife can apparently do it better – but how it is done?” The discursive image is a method of how architecture is done, rationalized, and questioned giving the profession a discourse to engage with. Thus, the discursive image has an important role in the profession and its advancement.
8. In the secrete or loophole of reality, what may be more powerful or critical than reality is individual experience, and the right to decide on reality can be shifted to the subject of experience rather than the reality. This can lead to the conclusion that both the real space and the virtual space are the same in that the final way of formation and existence depends on the arbitrariness within the subject. In other words, both real and virtual can be made real by the subject. If so, how is the virtual different from the real? By barrowing idea of Gilles Deleuze again, 'virtual' may be the stage of potential, and means the realization of the inherent difference. His famous idea of 'wrinkle' is his metaphor for the way 'virtual' exists. In other words, philosophically, the virtual itself has its own reality, but it is in a latent state without being actualized. Aligning to this concept, it can be applied to  paper architecture and product of architectural practice that more than 90 percent of projects are not built but filed in a folder of computer. Possibility from the idea and attempt maybe the one we should value and whether in physical and virtual reality.  The essential of discursive images is in its ideas and visions of creators in the realm of “what if”.
9. Vritual Reality in Architectural Academic — VR film offers preview of Amateur Architecture Studio’s Lin’an History Museum. Looking at the recent VR exhibition done in Barttlet School of Architecture, it reflects the disattachement of profession and cultural ideology. While transition of Ideas and paradigm in cultural and architectural space has been dramatically stimulated, physical architectural space still requires a plenty of time in order to be realized and published. Due to updated technology, the gap between ideology and physical world is divorced, and virtual reality become a possible bridge that fill the gap. “Our challenge was to create an exhibition of a building halfway across the world, which is incomplete and not yet open to the pulbic… In consideration of the visitor’s experience at an architectural show, we began by asking ourselves how to provide the sensation of being in the actual building through the use of drawings and models,” said exhibition director. In this moment, we would question on the future architectural medium, could virtual reality compress the disparity of architectural ideology and the time consuming physical architecture? Moving from globalization 3.0 to 4.0, would vr technology be a solution to overcome the physical distance in Architecture?
10. Popularity in investment in virual real estates has risen with the issues of housing crisis, economic polarization, cryptocurrency and technological innovation. Cyber world in architectural agenda is no longer a far future. Architectural idea and knowledge departed from physical body seeks for a new platform to express and witness its existnance. the development of these technologies today is a constant, not a variable. If the rapidly changing background is the default, flexible embracing and coping with architecture will become more important than anything else. However, still in many cases emerging technologies are only used as simulation tools to assist in the conventional design process. This level of utilization is no different from the stage when cinema appeared in the late 19th century, where it was simply used as a recording device for stage plays. Just as cinema discovered the another possibilities of montage and moving cameras and pioneered a new realm of cinema, the technology related to virtualization can also leap into an unprecedented realm through its own specificity.

Architecture theorists have championed the social value of the architect through the understanding and application of drawing principles, moving images from the mind to paper, and mapping the right parts together into a building. Our profession exists on paper and in theory against contending with craftsmen and engineers in the built form. The discursive image has been a unique tool in the architect’s arsenal for theorizing space to push practice in alignment with current culture or generate discussion on where architecture can force the culture to align.

This process has been unchanged up until recently. The digital hinge point around computing and knowledge sharing via the world wide web has distributed the architect’s tools to the layman. Today, the profession struggles with finding itself in society as our most prominent tools of shaping our discipline have become cluttered with non-architectural creators—both conscious and artificial—and collective action in the assemblage of these images.

These images have become an architecture to the public, and our societal value has decreased as non-architecturally produced imagery has dominated the discourse on ‘ugly’ buildings. To recapture our worth, the architect needs to reclaim the discursive image as a product of the profession or curate non-discipline images into a new narrative of the image as a tool to produce cultural ideas—and not architecture as the image only.

For this assignment, our goal was to look at the power dynamics that images represent in relation to the products of practice within architecture. The agendas we explored with this research were looking at the image as propaganda, revealing how the image is used to display power, and finding through the image how images convey the autonomy of power. Ultimately this agenda led us to question who we as architects make architecture for and begin tracing that power through the image. This research was meant to accumulate an overall understanding of what is missing in the architecture cannon—resulting in how the image can be used to expand and subvert the cannon. At the beginning of this research, my interest was focused on the social implications of image and how architecture in the past communicated our value to the public through the role of image. I believe that the discipline and the profession can rely more on the hybridized image to be more impactful and engaging with the real world. The role of the image throughout the history of architecture is typically the thing that archived and carried the profession. Yet, the image typically only told the story of the elite or those in power. By rethinking image and how we display the image of architecture to the world, is it possible for the architectural image to engage more in social, political, and, simply put, the real issues that impact our world? Can the image separate from only those in power and speak more inclusively? Through engaging in a discourse focused on the image, is it possible to rethink and reshape the practice of architecture and societal views of architecture?