Current Exhibitions

The American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI) was founded in 1986 as a professional organization to represent the business and artistic interests of architectural illustrators throughout North America and around the world. The principal means of achieving the organization’s goals is Architecture in Perspective (AIP) is the world's foremost international competition of contemporary architectural illustration.

Convened annually in the home city or town of the serving ASAI president, the AIP jury consists of three prominent jurors, recruited from the fields of fine art, illustration, architecture, design and education.

Originally established as a showcase for professional architectural renderings, the character of the show has evolved over the years, to reflect changes in the art and the profession. In the Observational Section, up to two dozen works are selected for Awards of Excellence. From among these, three illustrations are selected for Juror’s Awards, and one is granted the honour of Best in Show. In the Rendering Section, 50–60 entries are selected for Awards of Excellence. The premier award, the Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize, goes to the single image that the judges deem to be the finest submitted. In a subsequent on-line jury, the members themselves vote to select the Members' Choice Award, from among the images submitted for the show. In 2009 the ASAI International Student Competition was introduced to encourage young illustrators and to celebrate their work. All selected images are included in the AIP show.

Given the current situation a live exhibition planned to be held at the Tchoban Foundation—Museum of Architectural Drawing, in Berlin, the home city of this year’s ASAI president had to be cancelled. It takes place for the first time in the history of ASAI and of the Tchoban Foundation as a virtual exhibition. The virtual experience includes personal videos by artists about their selected image.

In addition to the exhibition an online conference takes place on October 16 and 17, 2020 at the platform of the ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory. The event and exhibition are curated by Esenija Bannan. The virtual exhibition was developed using Unreal Engine by Dmitry Vrubel & Victoria Timofeeva.

Start a tour through the virtual exhibition HERE.

To fully enjoy and experience the exhibition in Virtual Reality, we recommend a VR system. The virtual art exhibition is also available in web browser and can be viewed on any desktop or laptop computer. Use the WASD keys and the mouse/trackpad for navigation inside the VR exhibition. To exit press twice the ESC key. The VR exhibition is not yet available for mobile users.

To the online conference

Image: Dennis Allain. Alone, Photoshop, Wacom tablet, Cinema4d, 2040 x 2550 px (detail) © Dennis Allain

The Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome and the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin present an exhibition by the architect and draughtsman Sergei Tchoban. A native of St Petersburg who has organically absorbed the harmony of this city’s proportionality and similitude, Sergei Tchoban has always striven to understand the laws which govern the development of cities like St Petersburg and the great prototypes in whose image it was created. Is it possible to preserve these cities’ outstanding quality? And is it possible to pursue this quality today, at the current stage of development of architecture? These are the central questions posed in the present exhibition, which marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 – 1778). One of the greatest artists of his time, Piranesi succeeded in capturing the development of the European city as a phenomenon which, despite many layers and internal contradictions, is nevertheless harmonious.

Until the principle of contrast, as a predictable consequence of technological progress, became a key vector in the aesthetics of architecture during the 20th century, the image of the European city was relatively homogeneous and, as a result, coherent – which is possibly the reason why we a priori perceive historical cities created earlier than the 20th century as harmonious ensembles and, in their best manifestations, as masterpieces. With the start of the 20th century and architecture’s acquisition of fundamentally new capabilities in creating building forms and surfaces, the process of introducing new strata into the urban setting became especially dramatic. But does this process really imply destruction of a masterpiece? Are we destroying harmony or creating a fundamentally new type of harmony? This is the main question as far as the present exhibition (and almost every European city today) is concerned. It is a question which Sergei Tchoban sets out to analyze and answer – extremely expressively and polemically – with the help of architectural drawings.

A publication accompanies the exhibition.

Istituto Centrale per la Grafica
Via della Stamperia 6
00187 Rom

more details