Some resemble lunatic modernist follies abandoned after driving their owners to bankruptcy. Others seem like the architectural equivalent of those cystic tumours that grow eyes, teeth and clumps of hair at random. Filip Dujardin's nonsensical buildings are not real, but they're so meticulously composed that it's not always easy to be sure – especially as the Belgian is well-known as a photographer of real structures by real architects for real magazines.

But with this new series of images, Dujardin wasn't trying to subvert or parody his day job. In fact, he was so excited by the boundless inventiveness of contemporary architecture that he wanted to have a go himself – strictly in a virtual context, though. "That way, you have complete freedom, and there are no consequences for the real world – or for any real people living in the buildings!" says the 37-year-old. "It feels like I'm going back to my childhood, when I used to play with cardboard boxes. The only difference is that the buildings I create now are balancing on the thin line between reality and irreality: they're too abstract to be real, and on other hand they're too recognisable to be fictitious. That's what I try to achieve with every image."

Although Dujardin's work would be impossible without computer software, his methods are suprisingly tactile. "I start off by making a model of the building, often with my kids' Lego blocks. Then I photograph that maquette and use the resulting image as a kind of canvas." Pasted on to this canvas are hundreds of snippets from the photo archive on Dujardin's hard disk, which is divided into folders full of brick walls, glass doors, iron sheeting and so on. It's an incredibly time-consuming process. "You have to control every pixel of the structure. Even one mistake will spoil the effect."