Technical skills impressed in this year’s submissions to our annual drawing competition, but what the judges really sought was investigation and inquiry into big themes
As if in a knee-jerk response to last year’s initial flurry of AI submissions to Eye Line, the genie went back into the bottle this year, with only a couple of the 200 entries we received being classed as AI-generated. The most part proffered the now-expected high technical levels of digitally rendered submissions – certainly in the student category – embellished on occasion with skilled hand-drawing and even painting.
Of collective interest were a dozen entries from the Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering, notable for each bearing a striking visual similarity to the other, bar a digressive and skilled shortlisted submission from student Artur Akhunov. And Beirut Arab University student Sara Taleb’s DALL.E submission, although it wasn’t shortlisted, was the only one that piqued the interest of Nordic Office of Architecture director Knut Ramstad. ‘It’s a pretty complex image, cleverly constructed,’ he noted of the Soviet-style-brutalism-meets-HR-Giger AI-generated piece, Nihilism. ‘I’d love to know what the prompts were for this.’
But then Ramstad, who I’d first seen speaking knowledgably on Nordic’s use of digital tools at a tech event last year, was always going to be more drawn to examples of technical skill in the discipline.
For these reasons, he heaped praise on the likes of Victor Montañez, of Buenos Aires-based Studio Cumbre, for his slick underwater world visualisations, which looked to him like stills from Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.
With images rendered in a mix of Rhino, 3ds Max, Houdini, Maya and Grasshopper, Ramstad told us we were looking at the work of a visualiser working ‘at the top of his game – this is the best example of technical achievement on display’. But judge Sarah Wigglesworth, who has spent half a lifetime teaching that drawings should be treated as an interrogative tools, was left cold by the work: ‘fantastic to look at but it strikes me that it nonetheless remains a slave to perspective’. That view was applied to a number of less-skilled technical submissions.
Both Wigglesworth and Chia-Yi Chou, last year’s student winner and former teacher who is now working in practice, had similar, pedagogically-driven responses to entries, where perspective seemed to work only as long as it was put in the service of a bigger, layered narrative story. In this regard, University of Westminster student Wui Lin Lee initially caught their attention with Preserving the Revolt, interrogating how architecture and olive production reinvented and reintroduced to now-deserted troglodyte towns in Puglia might be a way of stimulating rural agricultural communities.
Chou enjoyed ‘the complexity of story and its atmosphere’, but Ramstad termed them ‘gloomy’; while I, with a decade of work in a similar vein behind me, felt the specific skill of this triptych was that it evoked a bygone era of socialist aspiration, like some Diego Rivera mural. But again, this was seen by all ultimately as explanatory rather than investigative.
Collectively, in a polarised way, the winners either justified scrutiny or somehow remained inscrutable
Likewise, my own fascination with the surreal Bosch-like qualities of Alberto Fernandez Gonzalez’s work failed to pass muster with other judges.
So, what might we say that we eventually recognised in our winners? Collectively, in a polarised way, they either justified scrutiny or somehow remained inscrutable.
Our student winner presented what seemed a profound and subtle meditation on the fragmented nature or loss of mental acuity experienced in a wider communal context; our practitioner a fantastical epic-scaled diorama that invited the viewer not just to consider the early 20th century ‘battle of the styles,’ but also the cheek-by-jowl density of future cities and their probable attendant stylistic superficiality. Big themes bridging the gulf between our inner and outer worlds.
Eye Line award winning drawings from this and previous years
2024 JUDGES
Chia-Yi Chou Eye Line 2023 student winner
Knut Ramstad Partner, Nordic Office of Architecture
Sarah Wigglesworth MBE Architect and academic
Jan-Carlos Kucharek Deputy editor, RIBA Journal