ARCHITECTURAL WATERCOLORS   ANDREW ZEGA & BERND H. DAMS









Above: The garden elevation of the Château de Versailles, known as "the Envelope," ca. 1671. The Hall of Mirrors today stands on the central terrace. The watercolor is five feet long (available).

Left: A perspective of a Parisian interior, a commission for The New York Times Magazine.

Right: An elevational watercolor of an antique oxblood vase with mounts by Thos. Hope. Private commission, London.





Welcome

We hope you will use the above link to visit our blog, NOTED, where we post weekly on architectural subjects. We also hope you will visit our new Latest Work page, where we present recently completed watercolors, as well as the greatly enlarged Contact/Press page, which now offers links to dozens of online press articles and blog posts—including a section devoted solely to articles from The New York Times.

For all their beauty, architectural renderings are above all precision documents. Both the watercolors of Versailles and the Chinese vase seen here are drawn as architectural elevations—drawings that, without perspectival distortion, document an object's true dimensions in scale. Traditionally, architects have created highly finished presentation drawings of unbuilt projects for a variety of reasons, the foremost being to seduce potential clients.

We developed our technique while attempting exactly that for several prominent American architectural firms and designers in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Since then, we have concentrated on architectural history, particularly that of European and American garden architecture and ornament—an extraordinarily rich and varied field that includes some of the greatest buildings and objects ever designed.

In creating our architectural watercolors, our objective is to depict the building itself as truly as possible, marshaling our research and technique to create a drawing that presents the building exactly as it is or was—or would have been, if it had been built. In this sense, our intention is to allow the thing itself to seduce, to render it in its full reality.



Architectural Notecards

The online gallery NOTECARDS presents over 250 images of our watercolors, which can be ordered as large-format, quality folding cards. Our limited-edition books, published to exceptional standards, are also available for order.


Available Watercolors

A number of available watercolors appear throughout this site and are noted in captions. Our Latest Work page presents our recently completed watercolors, and selected available works also are presented at the bottom of the Watercolors page.

To inquire about watercolors, either e-mail us directly with any questions you may have, or visit the Contact page for information about our Manhattan gallery, Didier Aaron, Inc. Prices for framed watercolors begin near $1000 for small-scale architectural ornaments; most works range in price from $3000 to $10,000. Large-scale elevations of French châteaux and ornaments from Manhattan's Central Park are proportionally priced.



Notice: ©2009 Edward Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Dams. All rights reserved. The written content and images appearing on this web site are protected by US and EU copyright law. No part of this site may be reproduced in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic—including recording and information storage and retrieval systems—without prior written consent.