This is one of four digital prints of computer-generated images by the Paris-based architectural practice Jakob + MacFarlane. The four images are studies for an architectural scheme: a pavilion building that is ‘nomad’, i.e. portable for travel, promoting a project for the study of the human brain. The images, green lacy forms on a black background, are clearly based upon representations of the human brain.

The four prints form a set from Jakob + MacFarlane’s ‘Invisible Drawings’ series and are titled ‘Pavillon Nomad II’; they were created in 2014. The prints are digital images printed by Studio Franck Bordas (37 rue Louise Weiss, Paris 75013).

Pavillon Nomad I & II are based upon Jakob + MacFarlane’s design for a travelling exhibition building for the Human Brain Project, a European Commission scheme funded by the European Union. Taking the aim of the EC project ‘to put in place a cutting-edge, ICT-based scientific Research Infrastructure for brain research, cognitive neuroscience and brain-inspired computing,’ the architects designed a pavilion made of transparent plastic, air filled, with a dark interior for projecting images.

The four prints of Pavillon Nomad II explore, as Brendan MacFarlane explains: ‘surface, volume and skeleton … just lines, an X-ray making the invisible visible’. Like slices of the human brain taken in the coronal plane, each of four images in the set are green forms on a black background. Each of the four drawings have an overtone of the basic views used in architectural drawing: plan, section, perspective and detail; there is no elevation as the whole point is to see the form in three-dimensions. The printing is crisp and rich, the colouring dramatic on the deep dark background. Nomad I is similar to this second set with the forms in white.

The architects Dominique Jakob (born 1966, Paris, France) and Brendan MacFarlane (born 1961, Christchurch, New Zealand) formed their architectural practice in Paris in 1997.