How do you dream architecture?

Dreams are set in uncertain surroundings. When we sleep, we imagine and become the architects of our own world, capable of creating, materializing, and inhabiting far from our consciousness and the desire for consciousness.

Oneiric Architecture is self-generated and self-destructive, leading us to project spatial sensations into our minds, created when reality has become obsolete. In the contortion of the daydream, Oneiric’s space is set in an illogical, strange underworld where infinity and absence, lights and shadows, patterns and paradoxes are the materials that shape of our quirky architecture.

This ‘random’ piece of construction, a creative and inventive spontaneity that comes from a naked view of ourselves, free from the social artifices of our environment, are expressed through photographic manipulation in the work Patterns, by the Polish photographer Dariusz Klimczak.

Dariusz Klimczak, born in Sieradz 1967, and graduated from Art School in Zdunska Wola, also works as an independent journalist, painter and aphorist. Over the last 25 years, he has allowed himself to fall in love with photography. His square images, reflecting the “nowhereness”, reflect this aphoristic style, swimming through a space lost in the gap between literature and thought.

His pieces are poetic beauty, an unmapped journey with no clear beginning or destination, representing time, nothingness, space. Architecture and landscape are interwoven in one single scene, inhabited by fickle beings. Using mainly black & white photography, he disrupts the unbreakable ties between a building and its surroundings through a play of light and shadows, vertiginous escape points and symmetry.

Architecture enters the image as a surreal element. Landscapes dominated by emptiness, where you lose a sense of the end, the beginning, where the scenery transcends, without any notions of a tangible reality. Arenas of desserts, dead nature, figures that where they come from or where they are going. They just live there

In these hypnotizing series, the image is focused on through architecture in an engaging manner, like spiral towards an unknown infinity. Each picture takes you to a distant point, driven by an architecture as desire, like an oasis of life in the middle of nowhere.

This is how Patterns is presented, just like surrealism and Dadaism, using lines, shapes and a sense of depth as a tool to explore the space. Therefore, the digital manipulation composes the image as the Dadaists would, influenced by photographic and cinematographic techniques, like the creation of elements and the juxtaposition of nonsensical objects.

Can this be envisioned in current architecture? Surrealism evokes a world of absurdity where reason fails to dominate the subconscious. Might there be an architecture of volumes and shapes born from free design? Is architecture a box set in stone that locks away creativity and imposes a way of living, an understanding ourselves and our environment? Is it a controlling device?

Is oniric architecture plausible?

Text: Ana Asensio Rodríguez / Translated by: Jacinto Castillo and Jennifer Hutchinson / Photography: Dariusz Klimczak / Originally written for Plataforma Arquitectura / Citation: Asensio, Ana. “Arte y Arquitectura: Patterns / Dariusz Klimczak” 08 Jun 2013.