federico babina simplifies iconic architectural styles into their most elemental form

‘complicating is easy, simplifying is difficult,‘ milanese designer bruno munari once said. ‘simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve. to simplify you have to remove things, and to take them off you must know which are the superfluous things.’

with a focus of finding the most elementary parts of an architectural scheme and the aesthetic backbone of a building, federico babina has realized 18 abstract compositions for the series ‘ARCHILINE’. without losing recognizability, babina finds an architectural ‘soul’ by reducing the work of ando, koolhaas and aalto into their purest representative form.

the project intends to display the volume, shape and style of architecture through minimal lines and graphic forms. in part a study on the simplification and identification of the basic elements of buildings, ‘ARCHILINE’ is simultaneously an exercise of decomposition and recomposition through the use of geometry and color. the intricacy of structural elements, ornamentation and architectural decoration are eliminated: ‘these images are like formulas,’ babina says. ‘a synthetic and concise representation of complex elements.’