Knut Ramstad in RIBA Journal jury for drawing competition
Knut Ramstad was recently on the jury for RIBA Journal’s annual international drawing competition, Eye Line, having been invited following a lecture he gave at Autodesk University’s Design & Make Conference in the USA.
Knut sat as a judge along with (from the left in the picture above) Sarah Wigglesworth MBE (Architect and academic), Chia-Yi Chou (last year's winner), and Jan-Carlos Kucharek (Deputy editor, RIBA Journal). The drawing competition is now in its 12th year, and it is looking to showcase the best visual representation in both the ‘Student’ and ‘Practitioner’ categories. The winning submissions will be published in the RIBA Journal this summer.
Entries for the Eye Line competition span a wide range of formats and media, from traditional pencil and ink to 3D visualizing tools and cutting-edge AI technology. Given the diverse nature of these submissions, Knut’s unique skills and expertise, particularly in assessing digital media, were considered invaluable in the judging process.
In an interview in the RIBA Journal, Knut was asked about some of the entries:
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’.
