Artist Filip Dujardin

This Belgian photographer uses images of mundane buildings and materials to construct fantasy architecture that’s both beguiling and unsettling.

When Filip Dujardin was growing up in the Belgian city of Ghent, he liked to cobble together fantastical buildings out of Legos and cardboard, creations informed by the castles and cathedrals he’d seen while traveling with his family. Today the 40-year-old photographer, still based in his hometown, brings the same childlike sense of play and imagination to “Fictions,” his series of photo collages of the wildly sculptural buildings he designs and constructs using digital tools. “The key element of my work is the hyperreality—to make people wonder if the building is real or not,” says Dujardin, of his entirely believable yet slightly absurd-looking structures.

Indeed, some of the whimsically juxtaposed elements and gravity-defying cantilevers jutting out of his buildings might seem improbable—but not necessarily more so than those in the visionary works of celebrity architects, including Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, whom Dujardin is referencing. The Belgian artist sets his futuristic forms in desolate towns or fields and often clads their exteriors in weathered industrial materials like concrete or brick. “I want to give them the touch of archaeological monuments,” says Dujardin. “My buildings have a patina and a historic feeling, as if they had been discovered in some city and photographed by architecture lovers.”

Mia Fineman, a curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, saw Dujardin’s work at the Highlight Gallery in San Francisco last year and was drawn in by its subtlety. She is acquiring two photographs for the museum’s collection, including one of a building in the shape of an upside-down L. “It looks like an experiment that might have actually been built at some point, but the cantilever is a little too extreme,” says Fineman, who plans to include Dujardin’s work in an exhibition at the museum in September. “You don’t really know if this is some modernist dinosaur out in the middle of Belgium or if it’s a fabrication.”

After studying art history and architecture at Ghent University and then photography at the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Dujardin has spent the past decade making his living as an architectural photographer, documenting newly completed projects in Belgium. His fictional buildings evolved out of his frustration with not always having a dynamic-enough subject to make an interesting image. He first experimented on his photographs of existing buildings, using Adobe Photoshop to digitally erase the windows and doors, for instance, to create a kind of surreal sculpture. Then he began using his own children’s Lego sets to construct more elaborate and bizarre maquettes, which he would photograph and employ as a canvas on which to collage elements from other buildings he had photographed.

He keeps a digital catalogue of building motifs and materials, and for a given photograph may use more than 150 individual fragments, all pasted seamlessly onto his imaginary edifices. “Adding shadows, that’s the main trick,” says Dujardin, who inherited his sense of aesthetics and proportion from his father, a designer of architectural interiors. “The building becomes real if the shadows are well done.” Today he designs his three-dimensional models directly on the computer, using Google SketchUp.

Dujardin got a big career break in 2008 when a Belgian architectural magazine he worked for invited him to exhibit images of his fictional buildings alongside his documentary photography at Bozar, a multidisciplinary art space in Brussels. The exhibition led to more shows in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. To celebrate being named a European Capital of Culture for 2012, the Portuguese city of Guimarães recently invited Dujardin to make new photographs (currently on view in the city’s cultural center) inspired by its architectural heritage.

Recognizing the design constraints faced by real architects, who have to deal with budgets, engineering, and client demands, Dujardin appreciates the control and spontaneity he has building in a virtual mode. “I think a lot of architects and engineers are a bit jealous of the things I do,” he says, “because I can work with complete freedom.”