Italian architect Federico Babina has taken a break from, you know, designing actual structures and interiors to carve time to create the obvious: 8-bit pixellated portraits of folks such as Frank Gehry (above), Zaha Hadid, and this year's Pritzker Prize winner, Toyo Ito. Archipix, at its core, is a series of distinct images pairing starchitects with their seminal works; in a design geek's fantasy, though, all of Babina's subjects would be key players in a video game, with architects rushing around trying to save their buildings.
Architecture has been the subject of cartoonish imagery many times before. In 2011, an illustrator re-imagined The Three Little Pigs as a tale starring Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, and Frank Lloyd Wright; last year a cartoonist turned iconic midcentury works, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, into a comic strip; and the storyline for the MoMA's first children's book, which debuted last month, revolves around a young architect named Frank. Anyway, more from Babina, below.
· 8-bit pixellated starchitect portraits by federico babina [Design Boom]